


Loss

by missclairebelle



Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-04-01 12:42:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13998579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: Modern AU (hurt/comfort) | Surgeon Claire x Jamie | The freefall of unexpectedly losing a patient for the first time.





	1. Chapter 1

 

**Loss (Modern AU)**

**Part One**

It was my fault that Marianne was only twenty-one when she died.  I had broken my promise to her when she was conscious that it would be okay, that she would be okay. And at the time it had seemed like an easy promise to keep. My fixes were supposed to be _easy_ , _textbook_ , _routine_.  But Marianne had died suddenly under my steady hands, her eyelids taped shut and machines breathing for her.  She would never open those taped eyes again ( _what color were they_ _?_  I needed to remember) _._

“ _Dr. Beauchamp, call it_ ,” the other surgeon had directed like we were on a television show.  I hadn’t listened to him, to just call it, and instead had used every extraordinary measure I had in my arsenal to try to restart her heart. Not a single one did anything to even delay the inevitable.  It wasn’t the car (driven by her boyfriend, _dead on arrival_ ) wrapped around a light post that killed her – something happened to end her too-short life when she was on my table. I had no clue what happened.

When she was gone ( _time of death 21:07_ ), I had to tell her father. _Charles_. I stopped just out of his line of sight and watched him in his last precious moments of normalcy. Sure, he was nervous about the surgery, but he had _hope and_   _plans_ , an entire future mapped with his beautiful daughter. A surgeon ( _me_ ) had told him that it would be okay.  Now, I would forever be the person who told him that his worst nightmare had come true.

‘ _Use the words, Claire. Use the words,_ ’ I told myself. I had never shared the worst news imaginable with a family because I had never had a patient die.  The only time I had been on surgical team that lost a patient I had been able to stand back as the fourth physician in line, hands in my pockets. Another physician, my mentor, had delivered the news. All I had to do was wish for it to be over and wait. Afterwards he had a hollowed out look to him, defeated and empty, and I knew that I’d soon be able to fully appreciate that feeling in a way I wasn’t able to right now. Certainly I’d felt the pang of a loss of life at the time, but this was different.  This time it was my surgical plan that resulted in Marianne’s death. _I had been the one who could not save her._

“Despite our most valiant efforts... she unfortunately succumbed to her injuries…” 

I silently counted between each word to keep my voice steady and my words from running together. The line sounded so hollow, like it had been lifted direct from a textbook entitled _Empathy for Doctors_. I had to fight the urge to beg for forgiveness - for the loss of his daughter, for whatever part in it I had played, for the promise could not keep. But it was not about me.  
The entire world melted with the news. Her father reached for my forearm. His grip was like a vice, a fact that I only realized on the periphery of sensation. The feeling of his grip on my arm was crowded out by a thousand other sensations – a dull buzz in my ears, the feeling like I was falling weightless, a loss that I could not explain.  I placed my hand on top of his, knowing any gesture would not put even a dent in his anguish.

By the time I reached “I am _so_ sorry” he had already gone to pieces. He made his way to the ground in hysterics, his arms around my thighs and face at my hip.  He cried and clutched me, fingers biting down almost to the bones of my thighs.  I did not know what to do with my hands, so I held his head in my hands and bit the tender flesh of my cheek to stop from crying. 

The battle of sharing the most soul crushing news imaginable over, I began my retreat to the staff lounge.  Joe Abernathy, another surgeon and the closest thing I had to a friend at the hospital, quietly joined me for the walk. “Do you want to go get a drink, Claire?” he asked evenly. I didn’t care how Joe had found out that I’d lost a patient. The news had probably made its way around our entire department by now.

I shook my head, recalling having made the same offer to Joe when he had lost his first patient about fifteen months earlier.  Joe had accepted the offer. We had gotten whisky drunk in a dark bar and had called the guy I had been very casually seeing for a few months for a ride home.  Dutifully, Jamie had showed up, still half-asleep, and helped us into his car. He had kissed my temple after buckling me into the front seat.  He drove Joe home first and did not comment when I asked him to pull over so I could vomit out of the car door and into the street. Jamie had just rested a palm against my back and listened to me babble, between gasps, about how I was dreading the day I’d lose a patient and feel like Joe.  Jamie had just promised that he’d be there for me when my turn came.  When we arrived at my flat, Jamie had tucked me into bed, wiped me down with a warm washcloth, coaxed me into drinking some water and slept, clothed, next to me but not touching. Despite that night’s display, we were somehow still together. 

And now that day I had been dreading was here.  

Joe and I stopped outside of the staff lounge. I didn’t know what to say.  He just studied my face for a moment.  “Go home, let him take care of you.”

I stared back at him blankly.  “Will it ever feel better?”

“Yes,” he said without much inflection, his voice quiet and certain. “Never good, but better.”  

He pressed a dry, platonic kiss against my forehead. 

“It will be okay.”

In the lounge I threw my pager and screamed an incomprehensible string of vowels. The pager rebounded on impact with the wall and cracked into three neat pieces. It didn’t satisfy the urge to destroy something. Crying, I stripped off my clothes and showered, leaning against the tiled wall. My mind obsessed on every step of the surgery over and over.  I cataloged my every movement.   _What if I had killed her_.

When I was fully emptied of tears and it was clear I would be unable to run the hospital’s supply of hot water dry, I dressed in sweatpants and a long-sleeved t-shirt. I did my best to ignore the chattering cadre of surgical residents congregated at the perimeter of the locker room.  It was obvious what they were talking about because they immediately stopped talking when I entered.  I wished they would speak up and give me some idea of what had gone wrong.  They didn’t and I ignored their sympathetic, awkward half-smiles as I exited, bag slung over my shoulder.

Despite my wet hair and the chill in the air, I decided to walk home.  Edinburgh was beautiful this time of year. It was icy and a dusting of temporary snow frosted the buildings and streets, tree branches, and parked cars. But I did not notice any of it on my thirty-five-minute walk home. My mind was stuck on _Marianne_ who was probably being opened by a pathologist at this very moment, her body already split open by my hand.  Despite the trauma of the accident, the surgery was just  _normal_ – anatomy where it should have been, structurally as it should have been. But for some reason she was dead.  I didn’t understand.

I was no closer to figuring out what went wrong when I took the three flights of stairs up to the apartment I shared with Jamie. I allowed myself to wonder whether she loved the driver (or at least thought she did). I wondered if she was like I was in my thirties: in love with everyone I fell into bed with. I wondered if she would have been like me at twenty-nine: touching a sleeping lover ( _Jamie_ ) and thinking about how stupid she had been to call anything before that person the love of her life. I gave myself a stern, profanity-saturated directive not to cry and was successful at banishing another round of tears from my eyes. ( _Buck the fuck up, Beauchamp._ )  

It took three tries to steady my hand and unlock the apartment door. Before I crossed the threshold I was greeted by a rush of warm, spicy air. Jamie had cooked dinner and it was sitting uneaten on the dining room table. Seeing the ruins of our dinner, I felt a sudden pang of guilt for being home late. It was just another layer of guilt for the archaeological excavation of the day.  I dropped my bag in the entryway and toed out of my tennis shoes. The kitchen was a disaster. The sink was overflowing with dishes and something curry-yellow was smeared across the front of one of the white cupboards.  Two plates sat untouched on the dining room table with room temperature meat, rice, and vegetables heaped on them. The nubs of nearly-spent candlesticks dribbled over the tabletop.  He had opened a bottle of wine and it sat with two empty glasses on the kitchen counter. 

I found Jamie in the living room, laying on his back on the couch and illuminated by the muted television. He had one foot planted firmly on the floor and one long leg draped over the back of the couch. I carefully perched myself on the edge of the coffee table, inches from him, to remove my socks.

“Hey there,” he said, his voice velvety and just above a whisper. His left hand fell heavily towards the ground and snaked around the back of my ankle. His finger traced lazily up the bone.  His eyes were still closed but he had the beginnings of a soft, sleepy smile on his lips.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.” I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, to study his still half-asleep face.  

In the eighteen months that we had been dating this had become somewhat of a ritual – a romantic homemade dinner ruined because I would come home late.  Jamie would be asleep on the couch in sweatpants with some late night TV show playing quietly in the background. He would have inevitably drained a few beers, the evidence on the coffee table.  He never complained, he never picked a fight about the time. He was understanding (probably to a fault). Instead of rage or disappointment, Jamie would quietly reheat leftovers while I changed (or didn’t) and we would eat (on the couch or at the kitchen table or in our bed).   Sometimes we would make love sleepily (in bed, on the couch, in the shower, in a tangle of limbs over the kitchen counter), slow and lazy and without any urgency whatsoever.   We would sigh _I love you_ and make various statements for our need for the other, and it was truer than anything I had ever had.  Sometimes our coupling would sometimes be fast, furious, desperate. 

The nights always ended the same, too. We would find our bed, in the end, to mumble the day’s events to each other, our sated bodies fitted together until one of us fell asleep.  It had, at least so far, worked for us, even though I often felt guilty that Jamie’s sleep schedule was at the mercy of my sometimes unpredictable work obligations.  

“Have you been asleep long?”  I asked, reaching a hand out to test the coarseness of the stubble along his jawline. He hadn’t shaved in at least a few days and he looked beautiful in the flickering glow of the television.

“No, only dozin’.  Didna hear ye come in. It was the smell of yer feet that betrayed ye,” he mumbled sleepily.

“Ass,” I snorted and tossed my socks aside after giving them a careful sniff.  I drained one of the two beer bottles sitting on the coffee table. It was warm and flat, but it wet my throat. Jamie’s eyes were still closed and his breath was deepening again. It was clear if I didn’t intervene he would be fast asleep in moments. “Jamie?”

“Hmmmm?”  His response was a purr, deep in his throat. 

“Will you hold me?”

“Aye, ye know I’ll always hold ye, Sassenach,” he responded easily, lifting his arm and gesturing to the space between his body and the back of the couch. He cracked one eye and the corner of his mouth rose.   “That lovely body’ll fit right here.”

I did not need any further invitation and gently climbed on top of him, shifting until my face was tucked against his neck.

“God, ye weigh a ton and yer as cold as an ice cube.”  Jamie shifted under my dead weight and struggled to remove the blanket trapped between our bodies and the back of the couch. “Even your clothes are cold.”

I shifted unenthusiastically to allow him to tent the blanket over our bodies.  He sealed the edge under his hip and where our bodies met the couch. 

“Better?” he breathed into my hair, his breath humid and with the sweet and sour edge of beer. 

I smiled against his neck in response, reveling in the quiet, even _thrump thrump thrump_ of his carotid pulse against my lips. He was so _alive_. I kissed him there, absorbing the gentle thrum with my lips. Pressed against him, cocooned in a blanket, I could feel the chill leaving my bones.   _Marianne_ would never feel the melting away of all earthly cares when curling up against a lover’s body to warm up. The thought made me sick. I nestled nearer to Jamie’s neck. 

“I need to be closer right now.”

In response, Jamie tightened his arm around me, turning his head so his lips rested along the curve of my ear. I could feel tears burning beneath my closed eyelids. I brought my hands between us and rested them on his chest over his heart. I hooked my bare feet around his calves. I was suddenly obsessed with bringing every inch of my body into contact with his. I wanted to climb inside of him.  I tasted my tears before I could feel them spilling down my cheeks.  They dribbled around my lips, still pressed to his pulse point, and gathered along the coarse hairs along his Adam’s apple.

“What’s happened, then?” he asked, his voice betraying concern. The hand that had been gently kneading my ass stopped and traveled to rest on my lower back. 

I stayed silent, unable to bear saying what was bothering me out loud. _She was dead._   _I had killed her._ Jamie lifted the mass of snow-damp curls at the back of my neck and found the exact spot along my hairline that was holding tension. His fingers worked on the knot of muscle gently and without a professional’s touch. He periodically strayed to tug a curl or to travel down my neck and beneath the neckline of my shirt.

“You dinna have to tell me anythin’ you dinna feel like sharin’, Claire.  But you’re alright, aye?”

I sighed against him, nodding into his neck.  “Yes, I will be, I think.  Just hold me for now, okay?”

I felt him nod. He whispered something in Gaelic along my jaw and I let my eyes close.   

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I mumbled.

“Just sweet nothings. Dinna fash yourself with it,” he responded evenly before resuming his mumbling. The soft rumble of the words in his chest, only a few of which I understood, lulled me to sleep. 

When I woke the world skipped and it took a moment for me to figure out where I was. The only thing I was certain of for a few moments was the solid length of Jamie’s body, smelling and feeling the way it always did, underneath my own body. He was still speaking quietly, the words generally unfamiliar to me other than the ones he used as regular endearments.

_My darling. My love._

My heart fluttered when I heard: _I cherish you._ It was at once haunting and beautiful in Gaelic in a way that it never would have been in either of the languages I spoke.

“What time is it?”

“Two… something… might be nearing three,” he responded simply. “Ye were out like a light. Had a nice little nap.”

I lifted my head slightly, resting my chin on his t-shirt. “I feel like I woke in another century. Did you sleep?”

He chuckled, letting his hand slip from my hair. “No. I feel like I’m lying under the devil himself, Sassenach.”  He twisted his long frame under me, just enough to free the edge of the blanket and let some air into our cocoon. “Didn’t have the heart to wake ye, but now that yer up, can we shift a little? You’re like a furnace under these blankets and my balls are sweatin’ like mad.”

I let out a long _mmmmm_ against his chest and stretched my legs.  I relished the feeling of him for a moment longer before peeling my body away from our cocoon.    As I rose, I braced myself to hover over him with my hand by his head. Jamie was finally fully awake and brought his hand up to catch my wrist, holding me in place.  His thumb brushed over my pulse.  My skin was tacky with sweat and his fingers slipped over me easily.

“Yer so beautiful, Claire.” His voice was low and his eyes didn’t leave mine.  

I didn’t feel beautiful; in fact, I quite hated myself right now. 

Before I could stop myself, I breathed out my confession. “I had a patient die today… a girl… a university student… on the operating table.”

I felt something shift inside of me.  

“She was young, Jamie. So young, younger than either of us.”

I was not sure why it tumbled out of me then as it did, but I couldn’t unsay it and he couldn’t unhear it.  

“Are you okay?” His voice was even and he raised a hand to cup my cheek. I closed my eyes and turned my lips into his palm, resting them there for a moment before turning back to him. 

I shook my head infinitesimally.   I wondered if he remembered his promise that early morning in the car while I emptied an inordinate amount of amber liquid from my stomach into the gutter. 

“I’m so verra sorry. D’ye wanna talk about it? I dinna ken the right words to make ye feel better, but I’m a fine listener, Sassenach.”

I shook my head a second time, leaning down slightly and catching his chapped lips in mine. I was trembling.  I didn’t think I could bear to talk about it and I didn’t know what I would say. I didn’t know how I would ever walk back into a hospital, scrub my hands and arms, and cut again into another trusting patient.  “Just help me feel like a human, okay?”

For a moment my heart twisted and I hoped he wouldn’t take this as an invitation for sex.  The idea of being vulnerable like _that_  with him was too much to handle.

He nodded, his hand resting flat over my heart just above my breast. My fear was unfounded because he somehow came up with the right idea.  “Why don’t we have a quick shower and then somethin’ to eat? I’m hungry, ye don’t have the sense to be hungry, and then we’ll see what else ye need.”

 The plan was simple and perfect.  The shower was purely utilitarian. We undressed together quietly, washed each other’s hair wordlessly, shared soap but did not touch each other. The closest we came to prolonged contact was when Jamie touching my leg, face screwed up in concentration. “What’s this?”

I glanced down and then looked away, wishing to dissolve through the shower curtain and swallowing hard. “Her father… he was on his knees… he was holding me.  His grip must’ve been tighter than I thought.” Jamie swallowed hard and nodded.  His fingers ghosted over the four long, finger-shaped discolorations and squared-off bloom of a thumbprint on the pale flesh of my outer thigh. 

My mouth was suddenly dry and I was lost again in a moment – thinking about Marianne, wondering what she had been studying, whether becoming a doctor was on the menu, whether she loved the driver, whether the driver was the person she would have turned to naked in a shower when she’d had a bad day, whether she had even lived enough to know what a truly horrible day felt like.  

Jamie touched my chin and gently guided me to look at him. I hadn’t realized I was crying until his thumbs began to brush tears off of my cheeks.  “Hey, you. Come back to me.”

 I turned into his hands, sniffling.

“ _Mo leannan_ ,” he whispered, gathering me to his chest, crushing my breasts into his chest.  And then I went thoroughly to pieces standing against him, one arm snaked behind him and up the column of his spine to grip a solid shoulder. My legs went weak and as I began to slip to the floor of the shower he firmed his hold on me and took on my weight against the length of his body.  He stroked my hair and allowed his chest to absorb my rising sobs.

So that’s 1/6 of what I wrote on a long-ass flight. 

If you have any interest in the song on repeat while writing this part, here’s a link: [Dermot Kennedy - After Rain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4KHcqxAvzE).

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Loss (Modern AU)**

**Part Two**

After our shower, I sat on the edge of our bed in a towel and watched Jamie dress. My eyes were dry, burning, and empty of any further tears.  Emotionally, I felt nothing.  Physically, I simultaneously felt as though it would take a gale force wind to move me from the spot and that I could be blown over by the slightest breeze.

When it had become clear to me that there was nothing more I could do, and that I would have to direct entry of the time of Marianne’s legal death, the entire world had gone silent. Saving a life is chaos – heart pounding, brain buzzing, blood rushing, directives and requests to nurses, hands feeling inside of a still-warm corpse, the whooshing and clicking and humming and beeping of machines.  When it’s over and the chaos of trying to save a life ends, it is like a loss above and beyond the bite of a lost life.  All that remains are the pounding heart, hands hanging in defeat, and a feeling that you’re being drained.  The room clears of people, the machines slowly click off and there is no more clicking, humming, or beeping.  When I called it I was in the room with the anesthesiologist, two nurses, and an intern.  All that remained for me was the silence punctuated by my own, rude, still-beating heart, and the need to say the words.  

Silence. 

Now, sitting here on the side of the bed that I’ve woken up next to Jamie in over a year’s worth of mornings and naps, that silence felt like it was a part of me.  Jamie had never yelled at me, but in that moment I wanted him to just to see if the sound would echo off of me.  I was hollow.  

“C’mon… get dressed, let’s eat somethin’. It’ll help ye.” I looked at him skeptically as he ran his hands through his hair and sent a gentle spray of water droplets my way. “I could feel yer stomach growlin’ when I was holdin’ ye in the shower.”

Jamie wasn’t wrong, but I hadn’t really taken notice of the sound of my own rebelling body until he said something.  The only thing I’d eaten since a noontime snack of apple and crackers was a swig of Jamie’s room temperature beer when I got home.  But I couldn’t make myself, a hollow vessel consumed by silence, move from the edge of the bed.  I confessed the feeling without shifting from my position.  “I can’t move.”

 Jamie furrowed his brow for a moment and turned his back to me, pulling on a pair of clean sweatpants and slipped into a t-shirt. I didn’t even register the lines of his body as he gracefully got dressed. The muscle of his thighs or the scars on his back from a motorcycle accident years earlier were _there_ but blurred, like they were on the periphery in a dark room even though he was right in front of me. I raised an eyebrow when he started to rifle through the drawers on my side of the dresser.

Jamie pulled panties out of the drawer (seemingly by just thrusting his hand in and feeling for something cottony and decidedly not sexy).  He raised them to me as if for approval before extracting sweatpants and a tank top from another drawer. 

“What are you doing?” My words were flat and in a voice that was unrecognizable.  I blinked, knowing that the voice was mine but needing to take a second to realize I had spoken.

“Getting ye some clothes. Unless ye’d prefer to sit in that soppin’ wet towel all night…” He crouched in front of me, unfolding the panties and holding them near my feet.

“I can dress myself. I’m not a child.”  The words came out with more bite than I intended. I gave him an apologetic look and bit down on my lower lip. In response, Jamie’s lip quickly quirked up in a smiled acknowledgment. His smile faded when he again gestured towards me, his fingers hooked in the hips of the fairly conservative pink knickers. 

“I ken verra well that ye can dress yerself, now just let me dress you.”  He kissed my left knee and looked up at me through his eyelashes.  Something odd stirred in me. It was a stab of appreciation for him, even though the fact that he was dressing me was incredibly _weird_.

“I’m… sad… I’m angry. I’m really pissed at _myself_ … I’m feeling  _something_ I can’t identify… but I’m not unable to dress myself.”  I wasn’t sure of the last, to be frank.  Jamie’s lips quirked again in a half smile.  Perhaps he considered commenting ‘ _all evidence to the contrary disregarded’_ in response. 

“Just humor me tonight.” 

My head tilted to the side almost involuntarily as I considered him.  He looked so earnest.  I could tell that he was almost vibrating with need, not for my body, but to fulfill the promise he made all those months ago to take care of me when my time came.  I lifted my hand from the edge of the mattress and let it drift to his hair. I worked my fingers into the damp tousled mess. 

 “Your hair is about five shades darker when it’s wet,” I mused pointlessly, letting my fingers rest against his damp, cool scalp.  He turned his face into my touch and dragged his lips from my wrist to the base of my thumb.

Without any further protest, I slipped my feet through the panties and lifted myself off the bed enough for him to pull them up over my hips.  He placed his lips just to the side of my belly button before repeating the process with the sweatpants.  “Good,” he said, inspecting his work.

 “This is the first time you’ve ever put clothes _on_ me,” I observed.  In a single, graceful movement he rose from his crouch.  

 “Strictly speakin’ that isna true.”  He gestured wordlessly that he had the same intention with the tank top, his hands filling it out inside to pull it on over my head.  I pushed the knot of the towel apart with my thumb and allowed it to fall away. I raised my arms, head tilted back and waiting.  He didn’t take his eyes off my face as he brought the tank top down over my head and breasts, fingers not straying from the fabric. “I’ve actually helped ye into yer coat on a number of occasions. Ye’ll find that I’m verra helpful gettin’ you dressed.”

Dressed, clean, and hollow, I transferred myself to the couch while Jamie messed around in the kitchen. Jamie was a fair cook and a better sommelier, but he was a total hurricane of disaster doing it. I could hear cupboards opening, contents shuffling in the refrigerator, and water running punctuated by quiet curse words and Gaelic.  Normally the _chaos_ of it would make me smile; the operating theatre had provided more than enough chaos for the night and I needed his help to fill the silence cleaving a way for thoughts of Marianne in my mind. No, tonight I could not handle chaos or silence.   

When Jamie exited the kitchen later, he was carrying the tray I bought to bring him breakfast in bed for his thirtieth birthday. The tray was covered in cheese, fruit, crackers, lunchmeat, a chopped up Mars bar, and two glasses of a wine so red it was almost black.  He set it down on the table and settled in next to me. The left side of his body was close enough that my body was warmed by the heat coming from beneath his clothing.  However, we were far enough apart that there was an intentional distance between us.

Jamie carefully constructed a layered cracker sandwich with a focused intensity – cracker, turkey, cheese, turkey, cracker – and passed it off to me.  He licked crumbs from his thumb before going for the Mars bar and his glass of wine.  Once he was settled, he drew deeply from his glass of wine and slipped an arm around my shoulder.

“Truth or dare?” he asked plainly.

“Really? Aren’t we too old for this?”

He withdrew his arm from my shoulder, looked properly abashed, and reached for the base of his throat.  His gesture, I assumed, was intended to mime clutching pearls.

 “Ye promised me that ye’d humor me, Sassenach.”

 At this, I smiled.  “You asked, though I don’t know that I actually _did_ promise to humor you.”

He snorted, hastily making his own cracker sandwich with none of the care given to mine and popping into his mouth whole.

“Truth or dare?” he leveled again, his mouth full and bits of cracker tumbling from his lips. He brushed them off onto the couch.

“Jamie…”

“ _Fine_ , I’ll start.  I choose truth.”

I watched him contemplatively.  He was turned from me slightly, tearing a chunk of cheese off of the brick with his fingers.  He chewed and swallowed, licking his fingers before turning to me.

“ _Fine_.  What’s it like living with me?”  I thought if I gave him a question that he didn’t want to answer he may give up the game and let me wallow in the silence, acutely aware of the beating of my heart. I was suspended between wanting the silence to take me, drown me, and end me, and the need for his attention. 

Jamie sat back, crossed his legs, and studied me.  The intensity of his gaze made my hollow head feel like it was spinning.

“Jesus, Jamie. It isn’t a trick question,” I mumbled.  I self-consciously reached for my glass of wine.  He caught my hand and urged me closer until our thighs were touching, grabbing my wine for me when he apparently deemed me _close enough_.

“It’ll take a moment. I’ve never put the feelin’ to words, Claire,” he admitted, his voice low.  “It’s a good feelin’, ya ken.  A perfect feelin’.  Of course, I love ye, so living with ye I still love takin’ ye to bed and makin’ ye cry out and scream my name. Livin’ with ye, ye’re readily accessible to make those sweet little sounds at the back of yer throat that ye make for me alone.” 

He looked down at me. He was smirking and he studied my body for a moment, eyes pausing on my breasts.  For the first time, he looked like he might try to take me to bed tonight. Admittedly, the thought was not unwelcome.

“But yer body isna the reason I love ye and live with ye. It’s just _you._  And havin’ _you_ next to me every mornin’ and every night is a gift… wakin’ up to your stupid, sleepy face makes me feel like a god.”

I dared for a moment to look at him again; he was looking at me and the intensity in his eyes made my breath hitch.  I suddenly lost the hollowed out discomfort I’d had for hours now and felt the blush rising up my cheeks. I bit down on my lip, feeling something rise in my chest. It was affection.

I had expected that he was done, but he kept speaking, bringing his hand to rest on my thigh.  

 “When I come home at night after a bad day I feel like I have someone to be a warrior for me when I need it. I know I have someone to listen to me, not judge me in pettiness or conflict. I look forward to nothing more than spendin’ a lazy weekend with you doing nothing at all. I look forward to nothin’ more than running errands, turnin’ off our mobiles. On those weekends with ye I dinna need the world outside of just _you_.  I like having Saturdays with just you and just me, makin’ lunch together, watchin’ a movie, havin’ a whisky together. I live to make the bed with you every mornin’ and then again for every night when we’re openin’ up our sheets. They seal the scent of you and me inside and it’s a comfort to pull back the duvet.  I like when we’re both hungover and order too much takeout and take up a residence on the couch. I love it when we’re being domestic together and ye grab my ass.”

I felt a blush settle into my cheeks recalling the last such Saturday.  My move led to me being thoroughly debased on the kitchen floor, Jamie’s hands still soapy and slippery from the dishwater he’d been elbow deep in when I’d grabbed him. We had been groping wildly for each other, our pants around our knees and one of my breasts bare and threaded through the neck hole of my top. When we finished the kitchen rugs were bunched up beneath my back. We laughed in a heap on the floor for what felt like days until he picked me up and transported me to our bedroom for an entire afternoon of teasing. 

“You seem to like it then… living together.” The emptiness in me was slowly filling, a warmth spreading over me that hadn’t been there when I had walked out of the hospital. “But be a little critical, Jamie. Try.”

He quirked an eyebrow, sensing a trap but accepting the challenge.  

“Well, ye leave yer shit absolutely _everywhere_.  But I love puttin’ away yer dumb girly bits and bobs in the bathroom, findin’ your panties at the end of the bed in the sheets.”

“To be fair you usually have a part in that last one, _ya ken_ ,” I accused him levelly, biting my lip at my snarky addition.

“Och, aye,” he admitted, his accent exaggerated and eyes sparkling before he continued. “I hate the laundry detergent you buy, but it makes ye smell so good so I just live with it. That smell… I hate smellin’ like it, but it’s still so verra perfect to me.  I hate, too, that I dinna ken everythin’ about ye, Sassenach, but I love the feelin’ of learnin’ the little things I dinna ken.”

My brain clouded and out of instinct, I reached down to take his hand. “Like what,” I breathed before I could realize I was saying it or right the course of my tone to something evener. 

“Oh, that isna how this game works. Isna truth or dare and a series of follow-ups.”  He gave my hand a small squeeze.  I smiled a genuine smile, and I brought my head to rest on his shoulder. “You didna even want ta play, Claire.”

I loved the way he said my name, his accent distorting it just enough to make it sound like it was spoken in a different language.  “Fine, then. I want truth.”

“Don’t we all?” Before I could realize it, I laughed. I turned my face and pressed a kiss to the t-shirt over his shoulder and focused my attentions on smoothing the hairs along his wrist with my thumb.

“What’s it like livin’ with me then?” he asked.

“Cheater!” I leveled with mock exasperation. “You can’t copy; it’s a rule.”

 “I’m verra sorry, but this is my game and I am not cheatin’. Thank ye verra much, now answer the damn question, Sassenach.”

I felt like I could write a well-sourced scholarly article on the subject of living with James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.

“The same as you said, really. Though I disagree that I leave my bits and bobs, as you call them, everywhere. You leave your dirty underpants on your side of the bed every morning… and on that white furry rug that I love and you hate.”

“Mmmmm, sounds so awful. Ye’re livin’ with a genuine Highland barbarian.” His eyes were absolutely sparkling and he disentangled his hand from mine to reach for more cheese.  He tore the remaining chunk into two smaller pieces and handed one to me.  I chewed thoughtfully for a moment, hooking one foot behind his ankle and bringing the bottom of my foot to rest along the high arch of his foot.

 “You buy really good cheese, like stuff I would never pick because it’s too expensive. And you’re good at matching it to wine. It’s like living with my own personal sommelier. We don’t have to go out on dates because date night is walking through the door for me. Of course, I love getting dressed up, seeing you in a suit and putting on something I think you’ll find sexy, but I like binge eating curry and binge watching Game of Thrones on our couch.”

I knew I was being superficial, simply cataloging the things that made us compatible that were near to the surface. But if I told him how much moments like this meant to me, the dam would break and I would dissolve into an inconsolable mess. In moments like this Jamie didn’t just give me just support or distraction, he took a weight off of me that sometimes felt like it was crushing me to death.  And today that weight was heavier than it had ever been. It’d been minutes since I’d thought of Marianne, but she was still so close to the surface.

“I like that I can wake up and not wonder if I’ve left my iPad charger at your place because all of our things live together, too.” 

“Mmmmm. Important stuff.” 

“And I love having access to my best friend.” I paused for a second and before the words were out of my mouth I was crying. _Damn the dam_.  “Because I live with you I have _you_ … and it has to be you, Jamie.  You’re the only one I want to ask me how my day was.  It has to be _you_ caring about the answer.  I don’t want anyone else to be that person.  I need you to hold me and play stupid fucking games with me until I stop thinking when the day was the worst one imaginable. Because I live with you, I have you to put clothes on me when I want to sit naked crying on the bed. I have you to pull me out of darkness, making me play stupid college party games.”

The words just kept pouring out of me and I was crying now, harder. I felt so selfish. 

_Me, me me_ , but I couldn’t bring myself to care right now.

“I love living with the person I want to tell everything to, the horrible darkness and the light moments. I love living with the person I need the most to ask me how my day was.” I stopped and looked at him, sniffling in a vain attempt to keep my nose from running.

“I hope by now ye ken ye dinna need an invitation to share.”  His voice was softer, the playful edge entirely gone. I knew my fingers must have been gripping him painfully, but I couldn’t loosen them. It felt like my joints were locked in place.  Jamie’s face did not betray any discomfort and he did not seem to mind. “Do ye want to tell me about it now?”

“Yes,” I breathed, and I did.

I let it all spill out of me, the words pouring uninterrupted.

I replayed for him, at a high level of clinical detail, the surgery. I started with “ _she’s ready, Dr. Beauchamp._ ”  My voice faltered on _doctor_.  I explained that I did not feel like a _doctor_ right now because doctors don’t kill people.

I explained that in every surgery, including this one, there is an almost ritualistic steadying of hands, a spike of adrenaline, a cataloging of training and experience. I explained the instinct to protect and the responsibility of holding a human life.  

I explained that all of these things coalesced into a quiet confidence, a conscious decision to be present for Marianne, to take a time out from everything else in the world.  It was a conscious rejection for a time of _him_ , love, _loving_ him, and of our life together. I explained that those were the most important things in my life and the most difficult to push aside, but they joined the same bin of rejected thoughts as politics, war, hate, money, famine, weather, piles of dirty laundry and unwashed dishes, the underwear on my pretty rug, getting home in time for dinner, and paying the gas bill.

It was a conscious decision to go empty and just exist in the sterilized world of a surgery. And I had been there with Marianne, ready to heal.

I told him how I’d betrayed the trust put in me and ruined God knows how many lives in the process. I babbled about Marianne.  How pretty she was, how she had smiled when I said to ‘ _leave it up to me_ ,’ how she had given me a thumbs up before going under anesthesia.   

I catalogued the hypothetical things I knew she could no longer do – the mundane (ironing dress pants, paying gym dues for a gym she always said she wanted to use more, deciding it was time to quit buying wine in boxes when she got her first job after university, learning to change the oil in her car), the extravagant (graduating from university, buying her first car without money from her parents, taking her first international vacation with the love of her life), the hypothetical loves of her life (the ones that would destroy her and allow her build the scar tissue that someone else would come to love, the moment when she found _her Jamie_ , the feeling of a baby moving inside of her belly).

I babbled about her father - the way that his face had gone gray when I had approached him, the change in him and the years he aged when I told him his daughter was gone at my hand.  I explained that I had wished that her father would cling tighter to me, that the pain would make me feel something.  I told him of the wave of guilt not only for killing his daughter but for thinking of _myself_ at that the moment.

I babbled about how I never wanted to go back to work, that I could never do it again.   _It was all my fault, Jamie. I don_ _’t even know what happened. How can I not know? I_ _’ve done that surgery dozens of times. She wasn_ _’t bleeding anywhere, everything was where it should be, everything designed as God intended._

My confession took my breath away and I leaned fully into his shoulder.  I could taste snot and tears and my own breath mixing on my lips.  

“I wish I could take on some of this for ye, Claire,” he began after a few moments. I swallowed, loosening my grip on his hand. His skin was pale where my fingers had been gripping him and I gently massaged to get his blood flowing normally again.  

“I don’t,” I whispered quietly in response, shaking my head against the firm expanse of his shoulder. “I don’t want that for you. I think I just need to… let myself feel it for awhile… with you.”

He made a low noise in his throat, tilting his head to the side and resting it on top of mine. For a time neither of us said anything. The only sounds made between the two of us were heartbeats and our gentle tandem breathing.  

When I glanced up at the clock and realized it was 4 in the morning, I shifted, pulling away. “I’m leaving tears and snot on your shirt.”

“So? I’ll just wash it… in yer stupid flowery detergent.”  I snorted, lacing my fingers through his fingers a bit more gently. “Want to go to bed? I mean, for sleeping.”

It sounded just fine to me, and so we did.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: There is not graphic sex in this part, but some J/C PG-13/R flirting. I don’t know that I’d want to read it on a work computer, but you do you girl.

**Loss (Modern AU)**

**Part 3**

I woke drenched in sweat, trembling, pawing with my hands under Jamie’s t-shirt in an attempt to find purchase on his back. _The blood, it was everywhere, pulsing from him soundlessly every time his heart beat._ I had to stop the blood, it was everywhere – drenching my shirt, our bed, the sheets, his skin. 

 

“Claire,” he mumbled sleepily, attempting to pull away from my desperately searching hands. _I had to get his shirt off_.   _I had to see._ He was more forceful now and he was grasping my shoulders. “Claire. Stop.”

 

“You’re bleeding.” It came out as a cry because I was _crying_. I blinked until the cinema of my mind quit playing the horrific image of his suffering. The image of his blood, leaking freely from his back, was tattooed on my mind and it took me a moment to focus.   _It was just a dream._  For a moment I allowed myself to luxuriate in the delusion that _everything_ had been a dream. Marianne was breathing in a hospital, unassisted, grimacing in pain, which made me smile. Pain meant she was _alive_.   _But she wasn’t._ Wherever she was, she wasn’t breathing.  I couldn’t save her any more than I needed to save Jamie.

“Claire?” Jamie repeated, his fingers loosening and one of his thumbs tracing a line to my throat along the arch of my collarbone. “I’m okay.”

 

“I’m so sorry,” I gasped, breathless. Cognitively I _knew_ that there was no blood, but I ran my hands up the expanse of his back. When my mind caught up to reality my hands finally stilled. Under his shirt, I could feel the rough, puckered skin from his beltline to his shoulders.  It was the same back I had touched, kissed, and clung to over hundreds of mornings, afternoons, and nights before. I was satisfied that he was not injured, that he was not dying.  

 

“What’s wrong?” he asked, bracing himself on his elbows and lifting his body over me to turn on the lamp.  His eyes were red-rimmed; his lips were slightly parted.

 

“Bad dream.” I was exhausted now that the moment had passed. I reached up tentatively and smoothed back a chunk of hair hanging over his eye. “Your back… I couldn’t save you.  You were here in bed with me and I couldn’t do anything.  The blood was… _everywhere_.”

 

Jamie settled back next to me, running his left hand up and down my right arm. “I’m fine.”  

 

I nodded, my adrenaline spike making me woozy. I had not met Jamie until six years after his accident.  The photographs I saw of the scene (the twisted remains of the motorcycle, glass, blood, flesh, gravel), and of his battered body had served as the gruesome source material for one hell of a nightmare.  Jamie had been an idiotic twenty-two-year-old riding a motorcycle with no shirt on when he hit gravel well over the speed limit.  His body – a collection of skin and organs and bone and magic – had slid over gravel nearly an entire city block until it came to rest half on a curb and half in the street. By the time Jamie made it to the hospital he did not have enough flesh for doctors to stitch him back together.  His body healed over months in the hospital and over a year of physical therapy. He was lucky to be alive and in as good of shape as he was – full use of his arms, strong shoulders and carved flanks, legs that carried him on dozens of miles of running every week, a brain that still processed abstract concepts.

 

In my dream, however, Jamie’s wounds had been open. The fileted flesh had been emptying the life from his body with each heartbeat. His eyes were blank, unblinking, and fixed on some point well beyond me.  

 

“Do ye need anything?” he asked. My heart was still hammering and cold sweat prickled along every inch of my skin.  I shook my head, retraining myself to breathe.  I kicked blankets off of my legs.

 

I didn’t know how he had any more of himself to possibly give me, but I continued to take.  “Talk to me until we’re back asleep?”

 

He positioned himself carefully, facing me and close.  “Do ye just need some white noise?” I nodded.  The words he spoke blended into exactly that as I slid my too-warm body against his. Soon the only white noise was our breathing.

 

I woke in the morning with Jamie’s warm, even breath on my face.  His eyes were closed and his arm was heavy over my waist. My mind registered the warmth of his body first and then leaped to the night before. I was overcome again by the helpless, defeated feeling that had deafened me when I had ripped my gloves after surgery. The edges of the memory were still raw and I remembered the bite of the glove when it snapped, rebounding against the flesh of my palm as I attempted to free my hands.   _Marianne_.

 

I glanced at the clock on the nightstand behind Jamie.

 

10:08.  

 

I had been living with this feeling I could not name for only fourteen hours and one minute. It felt like a lifetime.  I could not even imagine what the passage of time felt like for her father.  Guilt weighed heavy inside of me for even falling asleep.  How likely was it that he had found sleep while I was across town curled against Jamie?   _Not bloody very_ , I concluded.

 

Jamie shifted slightly against me and made a sound deep in his chest. At the movement I blinked rapidly, fighting the burn of a fresh wave of tears.  “Awake?” I asked.

 

“Yes.” Jamie’s answer was immediate.  He didn’t open his eyes, but he smiled.  “Are _you_ awake?”

 

“No.”  I allowed my eyes to close again and winced at the salty sting between my eyelashes. Jamie’s hand strayed from the back of my neck to rest between my shoulder blades. My body was not awake. My body was still arcing into a boneless sleep. But my mind was frantic, back in the surgery, tracing the timeline of Marianne’s surgery from anesthesia, the splitting of her skin beneath the touch of a scalpel, and ultimately the single tone of my voice when I finally announced my intention to stop life-saving interventions for our patient.

 

After a moment Jamie drew me somehow closer and pressed the length of his body into me.

 

“How are ye this morning, then?”

 

“Hmmmm.” I quietly searched for words to describe the feeling.  The guilt and sadness and anger and helplessness were less biting in the light of day, but they all still ached in an acute medley of conflicting feelings. I had a dull throb between my ears and a sour feeling in my belly, which churned every time I thought her name.   _Marianne_. I wondered about the dress that her family would select for her visitation, whether they’d be able to get her favorite flowers in the dead of winter.  “A partially empty vessel. Hungry. Trying to summon the strength to get out of bed.”

 

He did not say anything for a moment.  His voice was soft when he asked, “We are making progress then, aye?”  

 

“Aye.” My answer was a breathed whisper against the wiry bristle of his chest hair.  My mind clouded over under the covers, the joint of our bodies together radiating warmth into each other.  

 

Sleep was near, but Marianne was nearer. I could not replicate the irresistible pull to fall into sleep from the night before.  Instead, I laid stretched against Jamie, suspended between wakefulness and sleep, thinking half-formed thoughts about Marianne and her family.   _Her eyes, her eyes, what color were they?  Would her sister learn in person or over the phone?  Would they talk about ‘that fucking liar of a surgeon who said it’d be okay’?_

 

Jamie and I shifted against each other for a while in a useless mutual pursuit of sleep: our morning breath reciprocal and canceling out the other, our legs tangling and untangling, his chin resting in my hair, my face at his collarbone, my hands on his hips and then his chest and then his belly, my hair tangled in his fingers.  All of our movements restless.  It felt like time was not passing.

 

“I canna sleep, but I could stay here with yer warm body pressed against me, just dozing, forever.”  

 

“You’d starve,” I responded blandly, pressing my lips to the slight, hairless dip between his clavicles.  “You’d become dehydrated and delirious.”

 

“So be it, Sassenach.”  I don’t know how much time passed before he spoke again. His thumbs were making small circles along my spine through my top. “I did some thinkin’ last night while ye were sleepin’. What do ye say about gettin’ in the car and drivin’ ‘til we find somewhere we want to stop? Hours from here maybe, where land meets the sea.”

 

“You work tomorrow.” I glanced at the clock.  10:20. It took me a beat to recall the day – Thursday. Jamie had two more days of work left this week and he was already hours late for one of them. “You work _today_.”

 

“Taken care of… through Tuesday when ye go back to work.”

 

I felt like emptying the contents of my stomach at the thought of going back to the hospital.  Instead, I swallowed and asked, “How?”

 

“Dinna fash. Just think about loadin’ up the car, gettin’ some sweets, stayin’ somewhere new. I imagine we drive until we find some shanty with a fireplace. Imagine watchin’ me try to build a fire, laughin’ at me, tryin’ to stay warm together in the country.”

 

“Something tells me that you have plenty of experience building fires and there’d be little to laugh at.”

 

“Are ye tryin’ to talk yerself out of it or me out of it?”  I opened my eyes. He was looking at me, his mouth inches from mine.  “Because I’m not marrit to the idea, Claire. I’m perfectly fine to order curry and watch television here, or whatever ye’d like best. I just thought it might… help ye… to get away a bit.”

 

I touched his face, my fingers ghosting along the rough stubble along his jaw.  “You’re going on what… day three of not shaving, huh?”

 

He brought his hand up to cup my hand against his cheek. “Aye, somethin’ like that.”

 

“I’ll go on the condition you don’t shave this before we leave. Or while we’re away.” I gave his cheek a light scratch.  And he smiled.

 

“Aye.”  He moved his hand, bringing mine with it, to rest over his heart.

 

“There’s one other condition. Can you treat me like you don’t know what happened yesterday? Make me feel normal. Pretend you’re with someone who is not… damaged.”

 

“Yer hurtin’, not damaged, and I’ll do my verra best.”

 

And he did.  

 

In the car, we ate cheese-flavored crackers and sang along to Elton John and Bruce Springsteen and Britney Spears. Jamie sucked the neon orange cheesy dust from my fingertips without taking his eyes off of the road. I napped with Jamie’s hand resting on my thigh over the center console. We argued a little about politics and succeeded in staying off the topic of Scottish independence (our only conversation on the subject had ended with him muttering he was glad I did not have the right to vote in the referendum). He told me stories about getting in trouble with Ian and the green cast to his best friend’s skin when he told Jamie that he was interested in Jenny.  I told him stories about Uncle Lamb and the last trip we took together. I told him about how beautiful Jordan was and how Petra had taken my breath away.

 

The drive was _normal_ with the exception of Jamie’s non-reaction when I put my bare feet on the dash of his car and painted my toenails red. He did not say a single thing. A normal Jamie reaction would have been effusive, littered with the words _fuck_ and _Christ_.  The only shift was the taut workings of a muscle in his jaw.

 

We stopped at a pub for stew and crusty bread for a late lunch.  We sat at a relatively secluded table near a window.  The table was small enough that our knees bumped underneath it.  “We’re normal today, aye? If so, I have ta say somethin’ _verra normal_ to ye.” I raised my eyebrows and he continued. “I dinna want ye to think me as being insensitive or too forward.”

 

“Yes, Jamie. We are normal today. What is it that you have to say?” Something about his question made me feel damaged. He was asking me permission to speak, permission not to filter his thoughts.

 

“Yer so god damn pretty today. I can hardly wait to get ye somewhere private.”

 

My breath hitched and I swallowed. “And what would you do there?”

 

Jamie clicked his tongue, drawing from his beer. “No. Ye don’t get to ask a truth… we left off with the game last night. It’s my turn, Claire. We left off with yer turn. Truth or dare?”

 

Again, my breath caught. _Normal_.  “Truth.”

 

“What do ye think my weirdest habit is?”  

 

I did not even need to think to answer. “When you’re drunk and peeing you hum the French national anthem to yourself. It’s like you fancy yourself a French Olympian on the medal stand. It’s weird. When you get to the part with words you mutter-sing it to yourself.”

 

He smirked and I bit down on my lip, hard, to keep from laughing out loud. “I didn’t realize. Guess I’d never thought of it.”

 

“Yeah. You’re weird, mate. Truth or dare?”

 

“I’d say ‘dare,’ but I ken ye had a specific question in mind when we restarted the game. So I’ll humor ye, and say ‘truth.’” He studied me while I thought whether I wanted to follow my original intention. “Of course my choice is outta deference to yer _needs_.”

 

“What do you want to do to me when we get somewhere private?”

 

“Read ye the complete works of William Shakespeare in an English accent, even the shite ones like _Henry IV_.”

 

“I don’t mind _Henry IV_.” We were _flirting_. _Normal_.

 

“ _Anyway_ , Sassenach. When I’m done having my with the plays and sonnets and such, I’m gonna screw ye so thoroughly senseless that ye canna remember yer middle name or where ye live.”  He raised an eyebrow, challenging me to respond, and plucked a carrot from his stew with his fingers. I swallowed hard, unable to respond. “Truth or dare?”

 

I felt a blush creeping up my neck, over my chin, and into my cheeks.  “ _Truth_.”

 

“When’s the last time ye touched yerself?”

 

“Oh,” I breathed.  “This took a turn, Jamie.”

 

“Claire Beauchamp, come now and be reasonable. Ye made the turn, I’m just followin’ yer lead.” We were leaning into each other over the table.  His voice was genuine and his tone completely normal, lifting from the darkness of his flirtation, when he asked, “Too normal?”

 

My mouth was suddenly dry and I shook my head. No.  This _normal_ was what I wanted.

 

“So tell me then,” his voice darkening again. I would have only had to move forward a whisper to take his lips into mine and kiss the breath out of his mouth. But I stayed where I was, running my finger around the lip of my coffee mug, fighting the urge to make the first move. “So tell me when. I ken very well that ye do it. Ye ken I do it. Come out with it.”

 

“It won’t offend your manly pride that I sometimes don’t get everything I need from you?”

 

“Nah.” He waved a hand before dipping bread into his stew. “And I dinna have manly pride to offend in any case, Sassenach.”

 

“Sure you don’t,” I snorted before pausing to narrow my eyes at him. “It was Monday when I had the day off. You woke up with your hips pressed against me.  I’d been too tired Sunday night when I got home.  You had to go to work and didn’t have time to seal the deal. I wanted you then so bad I could’ve wept when you got up to shower.”

 

He groaned and rolled his eyes, popping some bread into his mouth. “What did you fantasize about while you did it?”

 

“You made clear the rules last night, Jamie, my love. You said it _isna truth or dare and follow-ups_ or some such nonsense,” I chastised lightly, putting on my horrible (and potentially a little offensive) Scottish accent. I reached across the table to pilfer some of the bread from his plate. He gently swatted my hand away before tearing some bread off for me.

 

“This is the new, revised version of the game, Sassenach. Follow-ups are allowed when asked by the game’s creator. Now, what did ye fantasize about?”

 

I blinked slowly, a haze of flirtation and lust creeping up in the emptiness. I felt warm from my toes to the ends of my hair. “Your mouth, your hands… everywhere.” He made a noise in his throat and I started to speak before he could ask another follow-up.  “Truth or dare?”

 

“Truth,” he responded, gently batting my hand away as I went for his bread again.

 

“Same question, then, if it _isna cheatin’_ to copy questions.”

 

“Yer attempts to flirt with me in a Scottish accent are dreadful for someone who has lived in the country as long as ye have. It’s verra distracting from the filth yer askin’ me.”

 

“Not an answer!” I chirped, unsure of how this tone of voice could come from someone with the lurking feeling of loss making a hole a kilometer wide in her chest.

 

“ _Fine_ ,” he said, taking a long pull from his coffee.  “Monday, when ye had the day off.  I woke up against yer round ass, as ye’ve now detailed so kindly. Ye were sleepin’, ye’d worked that marathon of an overnight shift. I didna have the heart to wake ye. I knew what ye’d get up to when I was gone… and apparently, I was right, from what ye’ve just said. The thought of _mo nighean donn_ on our bed... without me… drove me crazy. I thought about that fine ass of yours writhin’ on our bed with yer hands between yer legs. It took about thirty seconds in the shower.”

 

“Dinna fash about the thirty seconds,” I mumbled.  “Didna take me much longer.”

 

“Christ,” he breathed, leaning forward just a little bit more, smiling widely.  His eyes were concentrated on my lips.  “Is the accent an attempt to make me swoon for ye?”

 

“Uh-huh,” I responded, butterflies in my belly fluttering. “Is it working?”

 

“Och, aye, Sassenach.”  He tilted his head, eyes still fixated on my mouth.

 

“Good. Dare.”

 

“Eager lass. Didna even ask you.” He sat back, leaving me suspended over the table.  His eyes were sparkling and he was digging through his wallet, thumbing through bills.  “And we dinna have time, anyway. We have plans this afternoon. We’re going to the distillery.”

 

My heart skipped a beat realizing the amount of planning that had gone into this impromptu trip to save my sanity. When we stood he helped me slip into my navy wool coat.  He took his time pulling my mass of curly mass hair free from the coat’s collar.  

 

“Told ye… I’m verra helpful getting you dressed.” His hands were clumsy over the row of double-breasted fasteners. I couldn’t tell if he was extra clumsy on purpose to savor the moment or clumsy because of the angle. He looked beautifully frustrated, his brow furrowed and lips slightly parted in exasperation. When he was finished, he shot a quick glance around, apparently to make sure we were alone. His hands strayed from the front of me and skirted under the coat to take full handfuls of my ass.

 

“You’re helpful now, anyway.” I let my hands stray to his lower back to find the warm sliver of skin between his sweater and jeans. I bit down on my lip as my fingers dipped lower to slip just centimeters beneath the elastic of his boxer briefs. “The question is can your mind and hands work in the opposite direction and undress me?”

 

“Don’t start somethin’ yer unprepared to finish, Sassenach,” he warned me, his eyes darkening and his voice low.

 

“What makes you think I’m unprepared?”

 

He groaned, giving me a sloppy, smacking kiss on my neck. “Christ.  Let’s go.”

 

Back in the car, filled with stew and bread, we ate German gummy candies, sipped full-sugar Coca-Cola, and sang.  When the sugar crash started to gnaw at my consciousness I slipped into a dreamless nap, my temple resting against the frigid window.  When I woke my fingers were tangled with Jamie’s over the gearshift.  I was certain that we hadn’t been holding hands when I’d fallen asleep.  I just sat and watched him drive, sunlight drawing every shade of red and blonde out of his hair.  His jaw was set except for when he mouthed the song on the radio wordlessly.  

 

I felt a mass of renewed feeling in the canon ball-sized hole that had taken residence in my chest the night before. But it was different this time. It was not emptiness, it was not desperation, it was not disappointment and self-loathing. It was love.  It was need. It was obsession. It was appreciation. It was an awareness that I was in the middle of an eighteen month headlong free fall into needing him forever.  It was an aching need _for him always_. And it was more than enough for now and probably forever.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is by no means required reading, but there are references in this part to parts of the universe of these two established in this ficlet about J&C’s first meeting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: NSFW. Like, don’t blame me if you get fired for reading it on a work computer. If you don’t want to read that kind of thing, you’ll be able to tell where to stop. ;)

******Loss (Modern AU)**

**Part 4**

“Ye’ve been on the tour twice now, half listening each time.  Tell me, do ye ken all there is ‘bout whisky now?”  

In reality, I had only half paid attention during the tour. Jamie had thoroughly distracted me – pulling me into the aisles between barrels and touching me over my clothes, kissing me, whispering lewd things into my ear.

“Of course. I know it all. There are some grains used – multiple… _species_ of grains.”

“Barley…”

“Mmmm hmmm,” I confirmed. “Barley and some water go together in a big metal thing. And then there’s mash and a filtering process in a _barrel_ , Jamie.”

“ _Jesus_ , you’re _clueless_ about it,” he breathed. 

I ignored him, continuing.  “Sometimes whiskeys are blended and sometimes they are… _not blended_.”  I lifted my feet, skipping a bit to get ahead of him.  I turned to face him, walking backward and grinning. “And then rowdy Scotsmen drink it.”

Jamie made a noise low in his throat, probably to stand in for an overwrought display of incredulity. I spun back around and his words came to my back.  “Sounds like ye really learned a lot today.”

“Oh yes. I had a much better tour guide this time.” The flirtation bubbled out of me easily as we walked to the car.

“Ye wee snot,” he chuckled. He made a move to grab my ass and I squealed, taking an exaggerated step to escape his reach. When he batted at the air, his ready hand failing to make its target, he took his own exaggerated step to catch up with me.  He grabbed my hand and drew it around his back to rest on his hip. I stumble-stepped into his side, our bodies coming into contact with a gentle _thwap_. He gave my hand a squeeze before draping an arm over my shoulders.

“Ye were so awful with yer bloody friends when I gave ye that tour.”

“I couldn’t possibly know what you mean.”

“Aye, ye do, Claire.  Ye were checkin’ my arse out, makin’ eyes at me.  The lot of ye. By far the worst offender, though, was Ms. _Beecham_ , the linguistics expert. _Beecham_ and the Norman French. Christ.”

I dropped my head to rest on his jacket over his heart.  “I would think that my attentions would have flattered you, but of course I forget you lack all male pride.”

“Aye, ye’ve got that right,” he snorted. Jamie’s fingers hovered over my breast and my heart pounded in anticipation of a touch that did not come.  Just as I’d made a decision that _normal_ meant taking his hand and guiding it to where I wanted it, my phone rang.  The moment we were sharing was gone even before I had time to consider answering the call.  

“Dinna answer it.  Dinna interrupt… _this_.”  His voice was surprisingly serious. It was the first time he’d been firm with me since we’d left home this morning. “We _promised_ that we wouldna be on our phones.”

I furrowed my brow, recalling instantly the promise we made in the car before we left. “Just let me see who it is.”  

“Like who it is makes a difference to whether ye promised not to answer the godforsaken thing,” he muttered. He slipped his arm from my shoulder and stepped away so my hand fell from his hip. He was right but I pawed for the phone anyway, elbow deep in the recesses of my oversized handbag. Jamie stood a few feet from me and stared, expressionless.

 _Joe Abernathy_.  

“I need to take it. Joe wouldn’t call if it wasn’t important.”  I was not sure that my statement was true, but I felt compelled to answer his call nonetheless.  I tried and failed to ignore the look that passed over on Jamie’s face. “Just a second.”

“Aye,” he grumbled.  He crossed his arms over his belly and looked everywhere _but_ at me.  I could feel a tightly-coiled annoyance absolutely radiating out of him. I prayed as I accepted the call, that Jamie’s frustration would die here in this parking lot and not simmer, polluting the rest of our weekend.

“I’ll just be a minute,” I murmured as apologetically as possible.

I was true to my word.  The conversation _was_ short. Joe explained that he had gotten his hands on a copy of the pathologist’s handwritten notes from Marianne’s autopsy. I had _just known_ that I needed to answer the call. My heart hammered, waiting for Joe to identify some artery that I had nicked or an organ that I had shifted _just so_ , leading to the final catastrophic result.  

But the cause of Marianne’s death had nothing to do with anything I did with my hands or instruments inside of her body.

_A previously undiscovered heart condition._

“There’s nothing you could have done, Claire.”  

I tried to let the words sink in: nothing I could’ve done would have saved her.  I was unable to add anything to the conversation other than a slurred _mmmmhmmm_ and _thanks_.

A cold wind whipped around the side of the distillery and I suddenly felt chilled down to my bones. I did not know how to digest the news, so I decided to address the look on Jamie’s face instead. I made a show of turning my phone off before slipping it back into my purse. 

“Please don’t look at me like you’re mad at me,” I begged quietly, pushing hair off of my forehead. “The phone is away… for the rest of the weekend.”

“I’m _not_ mad at ye.” His response was quick and unpracticed.  “I dinna care about the phone.”

“Hmmmm.”  I didn’t entirely buy that he did not care about the phone, but I decided to let the subject wither for the sake of peace.  “Let’s get into the cottage, get some dinner, and talk about whisky all night.”

He raised an eyebrow, plainly skeptical, but he nodded assent to the plan anyway.  

“If you don’t pout about me answering the phone I’ll let you do dirty things to me later.”  My attempt to renew our flirtation sounded flat and was unconvincing.

 What I’d come to call a _Scottish noise_ rose in his throat.  If he was trying to be distant to show me that he was annoyed, he was failing desperately. He wasn’t annoyed and he wasn’t distant, but he wasn’t the same Jamie who had been grabbing for me and teasing me just a few minutes ago. “I think ye’d let me do those things to ye even if I _were_ to pout.”

Jamie made the comment to humor me; I knew it from his tone and his stiff posture.  He did not feel it; he was _worried_  about me and he was ignoring my off-kilter tone.  His decision to take my awkward lead was a gift to me. And I made a note to thank him for it later.

“I guess you’ll find out.  Now let’s go change, and find somewhere that can fill us with pasta and bread and wine.”  I stepped forward and reached into his pocket to seize his hand.  He turned his dry palm over and accepted my hand in his.  

The cottage we rented was situated on a plot of land bounded by a dilapidated fence.  It was a beautiful juxtaposition between new and old – large drafty old windows, creaking radiators, a white-tiled bathroom, and stainless steel appliances. When Jamie went to shower I took up residence in a high-back leather chair overlooking the sprawling back lawn. From my vantage point in the chair everything was encased in ice and snow and I could feel a chill radiating through the old uninsulated window. With a mug of tea spiked with whisky warming my hands, I was simultaneously taken under by the sensuousness of warming up and the gnawing feeling brought about by Joe’s telephone call.

 _There was nothing you could do._   

I repeated it over and over again to myself like a mantra, trying to convince myself that the pathologist had been right.  I walked through each step of the surgery over and over again for the hundredth time in the last twenty-four hours. Warm, a little whisky drunk, and cursing Jamie for taking a marathon of a shower, I felt a haze descend. And between the play-by-play of anesthesia and my first incision, and before I could make a decision to doze or rise, I slipped away into what felt like a suspended state between sleep and wakefulness.

Her voice seemed so real, willowy and young, Scottish.

 _“Why is this happenin’ to me, Dr. Beauchamp?”_  Her question was just above a whisper.

We were in an operating room, but cold wind was screaming around us, whipping my hair into my eyes and mouth and nose. I was _useless_ , standing before her in a frothy lace dress and bare feet.  It was the dress I wore to Ian’s christening the previous summer; a yellow stain marked the left breast where Ian had vomited breastmilk in a spectacular arc all over me.

Marianne was in a black dress, a high neck of lace choking her long, pale throat.  Her body, stretched out on the operating table, was long and still teenager thin (lean, straight, soft along the jawline). Her eyes were fixed on me -- _blue_ , limitless, unblinking, leaking bloody tears.  

“ _Why did you lie to me, Dr. Beauchamp?_ ”

My arms were scrubbed near raw and frozen in front of my body, hands above elbows and ready to be gloved for surgery. I opened my mouth to say that I _did not understand_ and that I had not meant to lie, but even though my lips moved, no sound came out.

“SAY SOMETHIN’,” she shrieked, demanding _words_. The muscle running the length of her neck strained as she attempted to sit up, apparently stuck to the table.  “I canna move. Help me _get there_.”

“Get _where_?” Wine and tea and whisky sloshed in my belly. I tried to go to her but the floor was a greased treadmill and my feet could not get purchase.  With each stride I was getting further from her, my hands still dumbly suspended in front of my body.

  _I was helpless_. I may not have killed her but I could not save her.

“Yer _heart_ ,” she whispered. Her thin hand, skin marked with the blue ink pen (scribbles of school notes about exams to write and the chapters of books to review), pointed at me.  “Yer _heart_ is _gone_.”

I looked down.  The yellow stain above my breast was not there.  It had been replaced by a deep, near-black crimson. The bloody mark bloomed out from my sternum in all directions. Suddenly my hands lurched free from their suspended animation and I touched the sodden fabric gingerly. My skin was torn open, exposing the raw meat of my chest cavity.  The appreciation of the wound’s existence made it hurt, an almost excruciating sear from the centerline of my body extending from head to toes.

“Yer heart is _there_.” A bloody heart, veins, and arteries dangling limply, having been roughly detached from it, laid between us. It was beating and pumping blood onto the floor. “ _Ye left yer heart here_.”

The wind finally died, everything stilling. I looked back to Marianne.  She was sitting up now. I pressed my hand to my chest again. My fingers met an unbroken expanse of skin above my breast. I was not bleeding. I was not torn open. My heart was beating in my chest and the blood was gone. I was wearing a pale blue scrub top and matching pants now.

Voice hard, she said, “Yer wearin’ what yer gonna wear when they bury ye, _Claire_.”

I woke with a gasp, sucking for air that did not smell of antiseptic and blood. Tears burned my eyes.  I could hear the shower running over Jamie’s out-of-tune singing and I fought the urge to go to him. Despite his unending reserve of patience for putting up with me, I convinced myself, probably incorrectly, that there were only so many times I could go to pieces in his arms.

I felt fucking crazy.

I retreated to the bedroom and crouched over my suitcase, looking for something to change into.  I rubbed mascara away from under my eyes as best as I could with my sleeve. Jamie’s tuneless song died on his lips when he exited the bathroom dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt.

My plan to be the with it, flirty Claire for dinner was destroyed.  It only took him a second to read me and catch on.

“Ye’re  _gone_ again.”  His words were not an accusation. They were merely an observation.  I turned to look at him, pursing my lips.

The distillery had been easy – flirting and roving fingers and truth or dare and innuendo. This was not easy.  He finished toweling his hair and leaned against the wall, watching me.  I dropped the pajama pants and toiletry bag I had excavated from the suitcase and stood to full height to look at him.

“You’re right.  I’ve gone mad. Like _King Lear_ -level mad.”

“No, ye haven’t. I promise ye. And ye ken that isna what I meant.”  I could tell he was trying to decide whether to come to me or leave me alone.  “What can I do, Sassenach?”

I had allowed Jamie to make a home between my legs the fourth time we met. Stripped of sarcasm and witty banter, I had stayed between his sheets for _days_. Despite the fact that I would have wagered my life that he had a mental map of my body seared into his muscle memory, just as I had of him, I had never asked for _this_.  I had never asked him to kill off a soul-deep, psychic ache with his body, but I needed him.

So I decided to ask.

“Make me feel something. I can’t keep feeling like this. I can’t keep thinking about what happened. I can’t keep replaying it in my head.”  Jamie narrowed his eyes and pulled away from the wall, approaching me with measured deliberation. He came into close enough that I could feel the promise of his touch on my skin.

After the worst day of Jamie’s life, he had explained that he felt like he was hiding beneath a blade of grass – naked, alone, exposed, without shelter, locked in a fortress. And standing here, _King Lear_ -mad and consumed by a depthless sadness, I suddenly could appreciate what he had meant. I had begged him using my body to come back to me. And he had.  Now I was begging him to bring me back from that same place, out from under the blade of grass.

“Yer blushing. Are ye ashamed of what ye’ve asked?” he asked plainly, setting a hand on my hip and allowing one to ghost over my right breast.  He drew me closer, letting his hand trail up from my breast to rest on my jaw. “Never feel shame for asking for me.”  

Our kiss was dry and soft.  I opened my eyes and started to pull back when I realized his eyes were open.  

“Don’t,” he whispered against my mouth, stilling my retreat and running his tongue gently over the seam of my lips. He tasted me slowly and thoroughly, his hands cupping my lower back and urging my body to bow into his.  The aroma radiating from his shower-warm skin was tangy with my body wash and his shampoo. The corners of his mouth tasted like the smoky floral bouquet of the whisky we had sipped at the distillery.  

For the first time since I talked to Joe everything went quiet except for the meeting of tongues and lips, inhales matching exhales, and the rustle of hands pushing aside fabric in a search for flesh.  I kissed Jamie and kissed him and kissed him, biting down into the soft swell of his lip and clinging to his body. Jamie kissed me as though he had not kissed me in months, sucking the air right out of my lungs. I did not make a conscious choice to be present; I had no other choice.

“Does it ever stop. The wantin’ ye?” His voice was hoarse like he’d screamed his way through a rugby match. I felt myself shrug dumbly against him, having no clue of the answer.  I suspected that the answer was _no_.  

“I _need_ you,” I confessed.

My confession was met with an almost feral groan. “Then lose the clothes.”  

The fingerprints of his words pushed me into a freefall where his scent, mouth, touch, and gaze coated every inch of my skin. He was not touching me but it felt like he had a dozen hands and they were everywhere.  

I was a smoldering coal and drunk on sensation as I bared my skin to Jamie.  I watched him watch me remove my clothes, piece by piece. We were close enough that I could see the hairs on his forearms rise.  His movements mirrored my own – first shirt, then jeans, undergarments, and finally there was nothing other than inches between us.  

The first few times I had stood before him like this I had felt vulnerable, not knowing his body or even my own.  We had _fun_ with each other in the beginning, but it had quickly turned into more than fun. On our fifth real date, around the time it became apparent, to at least me, that there was _something_ happening between us, I had used my hands to cover myself from his stare.  I had shakily demanded that he _bloody well say something_.  He had responded by peeling my hands from my body and proceeding to use words I had never used to describe myself ( _beautiful_ , _perfect_ ). 

Jamie had brought truth to his words and made me feel them completely ( _beautiful_ , _perfect_ ) with his hands and mouth and hips. That night his smile had been crooked and wide against my breastbone as he knelt, muttering, “One of these days yer gonna be the end of me, ya ken?”

I had that feeling now before he even touched me.

From that day, being with him became essential. I did not have just a craving for him.  Tonight, like other nights, I needed the connection forged by the curve of his fingers cupping me, his lips claiming me, and the jolt of our bodies joining each other. Even though I had memorized every inch of him that I could touch, I was still utterly fascinated by the things we could do to each other. We were familiar to each other – knowing the feeling of gooseflesh raised by gentle touch or a burning look, the slick slide of muscles over curves, the unguarded words that could fall from our lips like prayers, the exhaustion of making love making us tired bone-deep and woozy drunk on each.  But there was still a newness every time, too.

I leaned forward again, resting the length of my torso against him and holding my hair back as I kissed along the smooth, almost translucent shell of his ear. With a sigh, Jamie retook the lead, walking us back to the mattress and bringing us down, rolling until I was beneath his weight.

I was sure that the world was going to end there on the mattress, his lips on my neck and fingers tangled in my hair. My breath caught on his name as he filled me. I faded in and out, my body accepting the movement of his hips for what felt like an eternity. It was like I was made to absorb the pressure of his body against mine. 

“Claire, open yer eyes,” he sighed, slipping a hand between our bodies.  Although I shook my head, I managed to open my eyes a sliver when he touched me. A bead of sweat was making its way down his temple and his own eyes were half closed. I finished, clinging to him with a burst of light in my brain and a pulse that coursed through every nerve ending in silvery jolts of fire.

“Oh Christ, I love you,” I had sighed, my voice skipping over the words.

Jamie finished moments later, uttering a string of profanity and a litany of the ways he loved and needed me.  He collapsed against my chest and dragged a lazy hand up from my hip, mixing our sweat across my skin.  We were breathing like we were drowning. I _was_ drowning. The feeling consumed me and smeared away the capacity for me to feel anything else.  

We laid like that for what felt like hours, our breathing slowing, hands wandering lazily over one another.  When our skin cooled Jamie pulled a quilt up to seal us together and turned into me. He seemed markedly more coherent than I felt.  I was punch drunk on him – foggy and sated. I simply mumbled against his neck that I’d be fine starving to death on the bed with him. 

“I dinna ken if we should shower or not.” After a time, he spoke again.  “The little mewling sounds ye make, they start here.” 

 He pressed a hand over my navel. 

 “And they travel up through ye, until they come out of your pretty little mouth.”  

His hand skated over my stomach, between my breasts until he had his hand on my cheek and his thumb pressed into the center my lower lip. My eyes fluttered shut and my tongue instinctively darted out to taste the tip of his thumb.  

“And I ken just how to get ye to make those sounds,” he mumbled.  

“I do not make _sounds_.” It was a lie.  I knew very well what sounds he could bring from my lips. 

“Aye, ye do. I can show ye in round two… after we eat.”  He climbed onto me in a single fluid movement and found my throat with his mouth. The stubble that I had demanded he keep was rough as it worked over my skin.  Although I was still free-floating, Jamie’s lips tapped into something and made it flicker deep inside of me. Unconsciously, something between a sigh and a squeak fell from my mouth.

“ _See_ ,” Jamie laughed, sounding almost triumphant. “They’re _mewlin’_ sounds, like a bairn or a kitten, and they’re _mine_.”

“That they are, Jamie, for as long as you’ll have them.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is by no means required reading, but there are references in this part to parts of the universe of these two established in this ficlet about J&C’s first meeting.

 

**Loss (Modern AU)**

**Part 5**

 

It was early when I woke the next morning.  The youngest fingers of daylight had not yet filtered through the mist of pre-dawn fog to draw the world out of the night.  Jamie was still sleeping next to me and everything outside of the bedroom’s gauzy curtains was dark and silent.

I appreciated the quiet for a long time – the stillness of everything in the world but the gentle rise and fall of Jamie’s chest under the covers next to me, the gentle shuffling sound of the starched sheets when he readjusted, the soft sighs that sometimes punctuated his even breathing.  I studied the slight parting of his lips, the auburn fringe running evenly along his eyelids and brushing the slope beneath his eyes, the unbothered lines etched shallowly along the corners of his eyes (the ones that deepened when he smiled or laughed or rose to anger), the sad little hole permanently cleaved into his left earlobe where he had allowed a drunk friend to pierce it.

I wondered what I had done to deserve him – to have someone willing to _give_ and _give_ and _give_ to me and expect so very little in return.  I knew I was exaggerating a little when I whispered, “ _I don’t think I could have survived this without you_ ,” but I felt it with a sureness approaching certainty.

When I felt my body start to tingle from staying in one position too long I carefully slipped myself free from under the weight of Jamie’s limbs. I tucked the duvet over his bare back, allowing myself a moment, as always, to get over the twist in my stomach when my mind registered at the scars there. I was careful not to rouse him as I dressed in jeans, a sweater, and a coat, but continued to watch him just breathe.

His fingers curled into the mattress where my body had been and then released, resting flat against the sheets. I found his wallet in the jeans pooled on the floor next to the bed, took a few bills, kissed my fingers, and brushed them over his knuckles. His hand twitched slightly but he did not wake. I stuffed the money into my pocket and departed, tiptoeing, from the bedroom.

As quiet as our little world in the cottage had been, the morning was equally quiet outside of the cottage. The calm of it struck me as soon as I was across the threshold and into the cool air. The grinding of the key in the front door as I locked it drew created a sharp contrast to the stillness.  

Birds were chattering to one another from far above my head; the chirping was low and infrequent. Minutes passed in which the only sound I heard was the soft crunching of snow under my feet. I walked slowly, hands in my pockets and looking around, taking in the unassuming beauty of this place. The rolling green hills surrounding the cottage were covered in only the lightest coating of as yet undisturbed snow. The dusting from the night before melted and disappeared beneath my feet with each step.

Appreciating my surroundings, I was struck by the fact that it was longer painful simply to exist anymore. I could see along the periphery again. The ache was dulled – present, but not stabbing through me as it had been. _There was nothing I could have done._

I was going to buy ingredients for a proper full English. Marianne would never have breakfast again. It was a fact, but it was no longer my fault. I pushed aside a slight jolt of guilt, telling myself I wasn’t “getting over it” too fast, and that there was no timeline for working through it entirely. She would be with me, inside of each incision and suture and moments that I could never even plan, until the day I died.

It was an easy fifteen-minute walk into town but I was breathless and pink by the time I arrived. I rubbed my icy fingers together, cursing my inability to ever dress appropriately for the weather.  I gathered the ingredients for a gut-busting breakfast and paid with Jamie’s money.  The walk home was brighter, the edges of the sky turning a more shocking pink and gold with each passing minute.  I focused on stepping in the same footprints I made on the way into town, trying to lessen my lasting impression on the stillness. By the time I got home the sky’s colors were dilute behind a fresh blanket of early morning fog and the birds were trilling with more insistence.

Jamie did not rise until I was plating our breakfast.  I looked at him over my shoulder and smiled. My plan to wake him up in bed with a tray of coffee and a fry up was thwarted.

“I didna know where ye got off to when I woke, but then I heard ye in here cursin’ and slammin’ things ‘round. Figured I should get up and make sure ye dinna burn the place down and lose our deposit.”

Jamie looked sleepy. And beautiful. His face had the cross-hatched pink marks of someone who had slept long and hard, face down on mussed bedding. His hair was an absolute mess and his eyes were half-hooded.

“You’re not the only one who can cook,” I declared, more than a little proud of the spread I had assembled.  I may be able to cook, but everything I was able to cook was more or less on the plate I held out to him.  “Full English.”

“We’re not in England,” he reminded me, taking the plate and looking at it a little skeptically.

“You realize your Scottish idea of a full breakfast is more or less the same as mine, but with gross potato-y scones?”

“Ye mean _delicious_ potato-y scones?” He popped a mushroom into his mouth and shrugged, the slight quirk to the corners of his mouth betraying the zeal with which he wanted to tuck into his meal. “Doesna look or taste half bad, I suppose.”

“Hmph.” I made a defiant sound, but I could not stop myself from smiling. I reached out and ruffled his hair a little. He pulled back, shaking his head and attempting to pat down his hair. After a moment he smirked at me and sat at the round table at the center of the kitchen. My heart swelled at his show of slight grumpiness.

This was a _normal_ morning.

Jamie started talking after he had a few minutes with his coffee and had ensured that the almost orange yolk in his eggs ran with appropriate viscosity when the punctured with his fork. He rested his chin on his hand, fingers absently stroking what was slowly becoming an actual beard, not just a few days worth of growth.

“How are ye doin’ with it all today?” I was a little disappointed that the question was spoiling our morning, but I was unsurprised that he asked. After all, it was the reason we were not at home, me still sleepy in bed while he got ready for a long Friday at work.

“Just fine.” He gave me an unconvinced look over the edge of his coffee mug, raising an eyebrow in question. He could read me – my every slight, innocent deception, every attempt to spare his feelings or evade a question. This was no exception. My dumbed-down statement meant that I was caught. Without prompting, I amended, “Better. I’m better today.”  

Apparently satisfied, he nodded and turned his attention to stacking the perfect bite of mushrooms and tomatoes on his fork.  

“Tell me about _your_ week at work.” I needed the distraction and was embarrassed that I had not even asked him how his day had gone when I returned home from work two nights earlier. My grief, my shame, my all-consuming pain had meant that the comings and goings of his day were still a mystery to me. I felt a sudden pang of guilt and fought the urge to apologize.

He snorted in response, apparently unconcerned that I had not even thought to ask until now. “How much time do ye have?”

“All the time in the world,” I responded truthfully.  Like most Scots, Jamie was a born storyteller and I could have listened to him for hours about the most insignificant things. Frequently the best part of my day was hearing about his day.

I let myself be pulled into a story complete with voices, hand gestures, eye rolling, and meandering side stories with little relevance to the plot of his week.  From what Jamie was telling me about it, fate had picked the most inopportune time imaginable for me to lose a patient.  Jamie was busy, busier than usual, managing a project for a colleague on paternity leave and trying to salvage an account with a beverage distributor that had gone south at the hands at someone who had been sacked Wednesday morning. The fact that Jamie would step away from all of it for me, knowing full well the mess he would return to, made my heart swell.

When he was finished with the summary of his week we did up the dishes and made our way to the bathroom to get ready for the day. We brushed our teeth in tandem, talking about nothing of significance ( _whether we should replace the kitchen table, who would win Big Brother_ ) and when Jamie lifted me onto the bathroom counter I couldn’t help the surprised sound that left my mouth.

His fingers started an exploration that quickly turned to something more. He was silent as he undressed me and then himself. I flushed pink where he touched me and yielded to his hands with an unabashed readiness.  He made love to me quickly, both of us toothpaste fresh and uncharacteristically quiet, my arms draped over his shoulders and he held my legs hitched up to his waist.

Neither of us closed our eyes a single time and he did not kiss me until we were gasping into each other’s mouths.

We did not speak of it, other than to whisper “ _I love you_ ” before we left to wander the countryside for the day. Jamie explained the stories about standing stones, we laughed when we touched them and pretended to disappear into another time together, we walked hand-in-hand through an art gallery and spent a good portion of our next paychecks on new art for the living room, and drank mugs of hot cocoa with homemade marshmallows on a couch in front of a roaring fireplace at a coffee shop, our ankles tangled on the ottoman in front of us.

At the end of it all, our feet aching and feeling permanently saturated with the mist of winter rain, Jamie drove us to an Italian restaurant that he had frequented when he lived in the area and worked at the distillery. The restaurant was old and narrow, its green awning faded and missing letters. The inside was lacquered with the layered scents of garlic and wine and cinnamon and espresso. The gouged oak tables were close to one another with barely enough room for the waiters to slip along the aisles with large trays of steaming pasta and meats and wine. The owner, Luca, recognized Jamie at once, enveloping him in a hug and leading us to table at the back corner of the restaurant. The tone in Jamie’s voice when he introduced me (“ _my girlfriend, Claire,_ ” pausing slightly to look at me and smile before saying my name) and genuine care in his voice when he asked after the man’s family had made my insides twist into a knot.

Jamie and Luca chatted about rugby while Luca opened a bottle of red wine we had not even ordered with a corkscrew.  I was so taken by Jamie when he was like this – openly warm and social with acquaintances in a way that I rarely was. When we were finally alone, he sighed and smiled at me, looking me up and down.

“To you. _Mo ghràdh bithbhuan_ ,” Jamie said evenly, tipping his wine glass forward towards mine until they touched with a sharp clink.  

“No,” I corrected him quietly. “To _us_ and to _you_ , for doing… all of this.”

Jamie raised his eyebrows and drank deeply from his glass, just staring at me. The wine tasted like its main ingredient was not grapes, but an unrelenting hangover. I drank deeply anyway, matching the length of Jamie’s draw.  When he set his glass down, he smirked and tipped his head towards me in apparent approval.

“My girl can drink.”

I snorted.  “What did you say? The toast, I mean.”

“I’ve told you that one before,” he chided me gently. I flipped my hand so it was palm up and he laid his hand over it, his fingers tracing the veins at the crease of my wrist. “My love. Forever.”

Forever.

I played the word over and over in my head. I felt like my brain was swimming from the combination of the oversweet cocoa, morning sex, the wine, the cold in my feet, and the word itself. It was familiar, one we had frequently _assumed_ when discussing the future and said aloud infrequently. It had run through my head whenever I thought about us. However, when spoken aloud in such close proximity to my breakdown over Marianne, the prospect was somewhat startling.

“We fell in love fast, didn’t we?” I asked, tilting my head to the side. Jamie raised his eyebrows again and finished off his glass of wine.

“Aye. I wanted ye the moment I laid eyes on ye, Claire.” His fingers were poised over my pulse and the thought that he could feel my heart beat if he just pressed down a little and concentrated was so intimate that I felt the corners of my cognition fade. Jamie adjusted his fingers and I knew he was doing precisely what had made me go blurry. He was feeling for my heartbeat. “When I knew I loved ye, though… that’s a harder question.”

“Yeah?” I breathed, angling my fingers to feel his pulse, too. It was second nature to me, counting heartbeats in my head against the passage of seconds. Jamie’s pulse was somewhere above where it should be just from sitting at a dinner table but well below where it would be after a run or a good scare. “I knew that I was in deep with you, really _knew_ it, that night we read in your bed. After I’d gone snooping through your cabinets while you slept. I loved you then. I _knew_ that I loved you later.”

Jamie laughed a little at the confession, but his laughter quickly died on his lips. 

“I _think_ I knew that I loved ye on that first night. That night you came to my apartment after that benefit at the hospital. When ye were about to leave me, ye turned to me over yer shoulder and looked at me. Ye looked so bonny, but it wasna just bein’ in bed with a gorgeous woman that I loved. It was _you_. Ye apologized for snappin’ at me and bringin’ my mam into it. Yer hair was curling over yer ear and I had my hand on yer back. Ye had such a vulnerable look on yer face when ye told me about yer parents. I felt like my guts were gonna crawl right out of my body.”

I swallowed hard. I had known that he loved me quickly before I knew that I loved him even, but not _that_ early.

“I wanted so badly to make ye part of my life. I didna even think to play a game with ye, to wait and call ye or make ye wonder if I would call. I had to hear yer voice, to find a way into yer life.”

When he called me after the first time we were together, I had answered the phone immediately. It had not occurred to me to play games – hard to get, up for a chase, less interested than I was. It was not even a decision to answer; it was an instinct: _pick up, pick up, pick up_. I had hoped that it was him. At that point, I had a _crush_ , the fluttering expectation of something happening with him.

Now he was telling me that he had been in love with me.

“I remember watchin’ ye with yer fingers on my things. I remember thinkin’ that ye were going to ruin my life if I never saw ye again. Later, when we were in bed and I was readin’ to ye and ye fell asleep on me, yer breath on my chest. I wanted that moment to recreate itself thousands and thousands of times more.”

“I don’t ever want to ruin your life,” I whispered. His pulse was quickening beneath my fingers. I don’t know why I said it. It wasn’t as if he was asking for reassurance, but it felt well placed for some reason.

“I ken that, Claire.” He paused, his fingers stilling over my wrist. The din of the restaurant around us faded. “Truth or dare?”

The moment was almost too much, but I said “ _truth_ ” anyway, just to hear what he had to ask me.  The solemnity of the moment he created had made my heart rise on a rollercoaster that only went up.

Jamie blinked slowly, thinking and studying my face.

He was being tentative ( _pausing, blinking, breathing evenly, staring_ ) and I wanted to shake my head and then shake his shoulders. This was _not_ normal. I wanted to tell him he never needed to be guarded with me. That I needed him to _speak_ , _speak_ , _speak_. That if anything would come out of this week, it was that tomorrow is literally never promised and plans (the best laid or the hesitant, halting ones) could fall apart. So it was incumbent on each of us to _live_ and to _speak_ and _scream_ when necessary to have ourselves heard over the noise.

Jamie swallowed and reached for the bottle of sparkling water in the center of the table. He poured some into his wine glass and emptied it in a single gulp.

“So… forever, then.” He paused and I held my breath. _I knew_ what he wanted to say. “If we get married, where would ye want to get married?”

He refilled his glass, with wine this time, and topped off my own with only the slightest whisper from the bottom of the bottle.

I could tell it was not the question he wanted to ask or that he had planned to ask. I pretended not to know.

“ _When_ we get married, I don’t care _where_ we do it. Anywhere is fine. A registrar’s office. A courthouse. A backyard. Lallybroch. The hospital on-call room. A church. Whatever.”

“A church is last on the list? Right between the hospital on-call room and ‘ _whatever_ ’?” Humor returned to his voice and he grinned at me, the kind of grin I imagined won him lots of accounts on the job.  Even though he deconstructed the moment with a smile, it left another loving dent in my brain.

“Oh, you’re suddenly a devout Catholic?” I couldn’t help but laugh in response.

“I’ve _always_ been _**a** _ Catholic,” he corrected. “Devoutness is somethin’ that only to the hearts of the believer and his savior alone can ken, Sassenach.”

I snorted, sipping my own wine. “Yeah, well I’ve been enough to enough church to know that what you did to me earlier is not something good Catholic boys are taught in parochial school.”

“What’s the phrase on _Law & Order_? I plead the fifth? I dinna ken exactly what it means, but I’m stayin’ silent.” He swallowed the last of his second glass of wine and winked at me.

After dinner, we’d had enough to drink that neither of should have been behind the wheel of a car. Instead, we decided to walk the ten minutes back to the cottage. It was snowing again – fat, lazy, meandering clumps that clung to our clothes and hair before thawing into wet splotches. When we arrived back at the cottage we undressed and I squeezed water out of my hair, laughing at something stupid he said. I crawled into the bed wearing only my panties.

“Truth or dare?” I asked, watching him struggle to get a wet sock off.

“Truth,” he responded evenly, finally getting his foot free from the sock.

“At the restaurant… that wasn’t the question that you were going to ask me, is it? I mean, the one you asked about _where_ we would get married.  It wasn’t… the one you wanted to ask.” 

Jamie had his fingertips on the mattress to balance as he stood on one foot to remove his second sock. I reached for his wrist and counted in my head. This time his heart rate was precisely where it should be in a healthy man in his early thirties who had a good fright. 

“Your heart is absolutely pounding. Tell me what it was you were going to ask me… or you can just ask me.”

He looked up at me without lifting his head. “Claire, I…”

“Don’t do that… I know it wasn’t what you were going to ask me,” I interrupted, slipping under the covers to be closer to him. 

If he was going to call bullshit on me saying that I was fine, then I was going to call bullshit on this. 

“You made the rules of this game. You have to answer. It isn’t the question you were going to ask, is it?”

“No. It wasn’t.” 

His confession was easy and he tilted his head to the side, looking at me. I sat up, leaning against the headboard. He hooked a finger into the sheet and pulled it down under my bare breasts. I arched slightly as his palm found me and he climbed onto the bed, straddling me. I raised my eyebrows and tried to keep my breathing even. 

“I didna want to mislead you. So I decided I shoulnda ask ye the question. I was _going_ to ask what yer answer would be if I bought a ring and asked ye to marry me.”

I swallowed hard, flipping my fingers down his wrist to take his hand and bring it to rest right above my heart. “The answer would be yes.”

“Good.” And he kissed me, sitting back and leading me onto his lap with a gentle hand behind my neck.

 


	6. Chapter Six

 

******Loss (Modern AU)  
** **Part 6**

I did not know what the life expectancy was for the feeling of loss I had.  It was sour in my gut, gnawing the empty cavity of my stomach and rising in my throat. While using the bathroom late in the morning, I had checked my work email against my better judgment.  There, in my inbox, was a message from the Chief of Surgery attaching Marianne’s obituary.

 

The message: _Thought you would want to see this; it says something nice_.

I got as far as opening the link to see the picture of my deceased patient – smiling, face full of life.

I was immediately back in that operating theatre, helpless hands limp and dangling at my sides, smeared with a dead girl’s blood.  

I bent at the waist off of the toilet, flannel sleep pants around my ankles, wheezing and crying.

Eventually I managed to pull my pants up and get onto my knees on the bathroom floor. I leaned forward and rested my face and palms flat on the wall.  The grandfather clock in the sitting room tick-tocked with each second and my heart outpaced it at least twice over.

Part of me wanted to cry out for Jamie, to have him come to me and lift me off of the floor and hold me.  That part of me wanted to rest my face against the warm curve of his neck and seek comfort in his hands traveling over my back.  

Another part of me knew that I had to feel some of this alone – to let the overwhelming mixture of sadness and devastation and confusion wash over me.

Joe’s words from our telephone call the day earlier came to me: _“There’s nothing you could have done, Claire.”_

‘So bloody well say it,’ my thoughts demanded of me. The words prickled at the back of my throat and my mind willed my mouth to draw them out, to speak them into existence.

I crawled to the bathroom sink and pulled myself up off of the floor to look into the mirror.

“Say it,” I whispered, wiping the tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand.  I ran the tap, washed my hands and splashed cool water over my cheeks. I rubbed my eyes and left the tap running for some white noise. “Fucking say it, Claire.”

_It wasn’t my fault._

My mind was there, but my mouth would not speak the words into existence.

I shook my head and just continued to stare, willing my mouth to form the words and my lips to let them free. I cracked my neck and rolled my shoulders.

For a moment I just begged myself to feel _something_ , _everything_ – the ache in my head, the despair clutching my throat, the emptiness in my guts, the crawling tickle on my tongue in anticipation of the words, the helplessness of my lifeless hands.

I heard Jamie stirring down the hall and pushed the door shut, needing a minute to just be _alone_ with this mirror. Jamie never slept in past 8:00 unless I was in bed. I could see sunlight in the hallway and knew that if I was not next to him, he would soon be awake.

“It wasn’t –”

My voice hitched and only a long breath came out, not the absolution I hoped would come. It was like my body was holding onto the words.

I started to cry again. It was not the kind of cry with drool and snot and sobs that ache from the core.  It was a slow, unconscious cry, with tears leaking, breathing even, and a fathomless well of emptiness.

A stream of thoughts mixed with the soft rush of the tap water: Was it selfish to wonder how much longer I had to feel this way? Was it wrong to wonder if I would be able to go back to work on Tuesday and cut another human open? Was it cruel to Marianne’s memory to wonder if this made me damaged goods?

“Claire Beauchamp,” I whispered, my voice flat and tentative as if I’d never said it aloud, “was not at fault.”

Reciting the pathology report’s conclusion and regurgitating Joe’s words stung less.

I tilted my head, hiccupped, swallowed. My mouth was sour – bad breath, too much wine, a restless sleep.  I scooped a handful of water into my mouth and swished it around.  My spit came out as I coughed out a sob. Water dribbled down the front of my shirt and chin.  I was floating ten feet outside of my body.  I dried my face and returned my eyes to the mirror, recognizing the disheveled reflection as myself only in principle.

I tried something else, an entrée to what I really needed to say:

“It was her heart.”

I nodded, slowly, attempting to encourage myself. My hands gripped the sides of the sink.

_But it was your fucking hands, your operating room, your patient._

The words that I was suddenly fixated on ran across my mind again: _It wasn’t my fault._

_“Leave it up to me,” I had said to Marianne, touching her uninjured shoulder. Her father had **thanked me** in the hallway before the surgery. Before I walked away to prep for surgery, he had said, “Protect my baby girl.” The last words I spoke to him before the operation that killed his baby girl and had to tell him she was gone: “This is routine.” _

I tried the words that I would never say again to a patient, the ones that I had spoken to Marianne: “Leave it up to me.”

Unable to stand the taste in my mouth for another moment I reached for the first toothbrush and toothpaste I saw in the toiletry bag on the back of the toilet ( _Jamie’s_ ).  I furiously brushed until my gums were tender, swollen, too pink.

I spat a small amount of blood into the bowl and it swirled away as if it was never there. The clench in my belly was almost painful.

The same tired face was staring back at me when I opened my eyes: red-rimmed and puffy eyes watering, nose pink and dripping, cheeks too pale and tearstained. I hiccupped and stomach acid flooded my mouth.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” The profanity fell from my lips easily.

“Claire?” Jamie asked from the other side of the door. I could hear his hand on the doorknob. “What’s the matter?”

“Just a minute,” I hiccupped again, splashing some more water on my face and finally turning off the tap. I didn’t want him to see me like this – crumbling, red, raw, aching. I had moved beyond _numb_ , well past _hollow_. I was destroyed – angry, hurt, disappointed in myself. The thought of his touch – on my awful useless hands, on my tear-stained and snot-sticky face – was too much on top of the gaping wound of loss.

“Are ye alright?” he responded. His voice was too _soft_ , too _even_ for me.

“I said hang on.” My voice had more bite than he deserved and I knew it, but I needed to be left alone.

“Okay.”

‘ _Scream at me, stomp away, leave me to this. It’s no more than I deserve_ ,’ I thought. I waited for the sound of his feet on the hardwood floor, retreating from me. Instead I heard the soft slide of what I assumed was his body sinking to the floor with his back against the wall in the hallway.

“Just leave me alone right now. Please.” It sounded like a request. It wasn’t.

“I canna do that,” he said as I opened the door.

When he saw me he rose and took a step towards me. I raised my hand and pressed it to the center of his chest, pushing him away. He was so alive, so warm, so willing to take the pain. He raised his hands before continuing.  

“I know ye’re hurtin’. Dinna shut me out.”

“Jamie.” In my head his name was a sigh, but it came out sharp, pointed. I tried and failed to temper my tone when I said, “I love you, but you _don’t_ know. The l-last thing I want to hurt you, but I need to be… uh… alone.”

Jamie’s face changed – it was as though I’d punched him right in the chest. The muscles under my hand quickly contracted and then relaxed. I drew back my hand, adding my ability to make that look cross his face to the litany of things I hated about myself.

“I-I’m… I’m s-sorry,” I stammered between hiccups.

I walked away from him – one of the first times I’d ever done it in a year and a half together.  And it felt bloody awful.

I retreated to the bedroom and rummaged through my suitcase for fresh clothes. My mind was at war with itself.

Jamie had put together this weekend – arranged to be off of work, picked this lovely quaint town that bled his history and his own recovery ( _Afghanistan and the emptiness of war_ , _PTSD_ ), reserved this beautiful cottage.  I couldn’t stand the thought of that much care being directed my way.

I couldn’t focus on him right now. I couldn’t temper whatever squall was threatening to rage inside of me for his benefit. I had to get away before our relationship became collateral damage of my rioting mind.

I looked everywhere _but_ the bed while I dressed ( _mussed sheets, the indentations of heads pillows just inches from each other, the previous day’s knickers tangled in the bedsheets_ ). When I was clad in jeans, boots, and a sweater, I checked my hair and steeled myself for whatever I was going to walk into.

Jamie had relocated from the hallway to the living room. He was sitting on the couch, legs crossed, his finger aimlessly swiping on my iPad and his eyes fixed on the floor slightly above the screen. My heart would have broken if it wasn’t already in a million pieces.

“Are ye going to take the car?” he asked, his voice warm but detached. He did not look up at me.

“Yes, if you don’t mind.” I wrung my hands together before shoving them deep into the pockets of my jeans. “I’m sorry.”

He finally looked up at me and set my iPad to the side.

“Ye dinna need to apologize, Claire. I’m not mad. I’m worried. Ye’re all over the map.”

I bit back the urge to ask him to tell me something I didn’t know.

“Ye’re hot then cold. Crying then laughing. Present then far away. Ye say ye need my touch, but ye canna stand to be touched. The swings make me worry about ye.”

I turned, unable to look at him any longer. _‘I’m sorry_ ’ was all I had left so I said it again and he made a sound low in his throat.

“Really, ye needta quit with the apologies. I am no’ sure ye should be driving when ye’re like this”

“It’ll be fine. It’s just some tears.”

He picked the keys up from the coffee table and held them out on his pointer finger, not looking entirely convinced. I walked to him and stood for a moment before taking them. I leaned down to kiss him and he turned. My lips hit his cheek. I could tell he was letting me take the car against his better judgment. I’d left him without any option to care for me and he was lost.

“Can I touch ye?” he asked, his voice level. I assented with a nod and he brought my face down closer.  Jamie brushed his lips over my forehead then pressed them to my mouth. The kiss was chaste and dry, neither of our tongues seeking out the other. Jamie was the one to pull back and he simply said, “Call me today, aye? I ken ye need some alone time, but _I_ need t’know ye’re safe.”

Calling him was an easy thing to agree to, so I did with a nod.

I drove until I reached a park.  I didn’t know where I was going when I started to walk, but once I started I quickly allowed myself to get lost.

There is a certain thrill to being a surgeon – being rare, valuable.  It is not ego; it is knowledge that you can save a life.

There is a certain power in healing – opening someone, seeing the parts of them no one else can see and manipulating them to heal whatever ails them.

I had experienced an unexpected save: the God-like feeling, the rush of adrenaline. There is a feeling a lot like arousal of bringing someone back to life.  

And now I had experienced the opposite: the absolute gutting self-hatred of an unexpected loss. With the experience came devastation.

Despite Joe’s affirmation, the pathologist’s conclusion, my own assessment of every step from anesthesia through declaring the time of death, I could not help but blame myself.

Marianne had been young and fresh. She was away from home for the first time, belonging to the world and herself.

And now she belonged to the dirt.

Marianne’s death _belonged_ to me. It would stay with me until my mind went or I too belonged to dirt.

I spoke every step of the surgery out loud – nothing to listen to me but the crossbills living in Scots pines, the soggy carpet of leaves and pine needles under my feet. When my ankle caught a felled branch I realized I was going to fall before gravity took me. I hit the muck-covered ground with a hollow soft sound and a crack.

On the ground, breath knocked out of me, cold, and a little stunned, I was suspended in time.  Everything and nothing hurt at once – my entire body was tense and vibrating from the impact.

It felt like a year passed before I was able to roll onto my back. My wrist throbbed under my probing doctor’s touch in a way that told me it likely wasn’t broken. The traitorous ankle that had caught the branch ached, but was likely also just sprained.  

I felt the blood pulsing with each heartbeat from a gouge in my cheek before I tasted it. I had chomped down at the moment of impact. The skin on my right palm was scored from bracing my fall and it trickled blood from small bruise-surrounded lacerations.

When I started to cry, it wasn’t from physical pain.

I cried hard, gasping and choking. For Marianne. For my inability to save her.  For putting her in that position in the first place. For the loss of someone I did not know.  For the failure to fulfill my promise.  For the self-doubt that wracked me – the fear that I could never go to work again, that my reaction to all of this was abnormal.

I finally shifted onto my knees for the second time that day.

It took me fifteen minutes to hobble a straight route back to the car and two minutes in the car to find a pub. I cleaned my bloody hand and rinsed my mouth until the water ran pink instead of red in the bathroom.

And then I drank. The whisky burned the cut in my mouth. And I kept drinking. The barkeep must have known just from looking at me that I didn’t want to talk and just left the bottle for me.

It was a few hours into my bender that Jamie called. I hit “decline” on the screen and hammered out a text message that said: “I’m fine. Be back in time to have lunch. xx.”

I was drunk enough that the words blurred on the screen and it took me a few tries to get the sentiment right, to appear sober. The last thing I wanted was for Jamie to _worry_.

His response was simple: “Ok. Love you.”

I flipped the phone so it was screen down on the bar.

“Lass, I needta cut ye off,” the barkeeper finally said when I’d run the bottle dry. “Ye weigh no more than the wind, but ye’ve had a good run at that bottle, aye?”

I nodded, sniffing, knowing he was right. The world was blurry on the edges. I wiped at a small ring of whisky on the bar and pulled back as the sting of the alcohol registered in the cuts.

“How do ye plan to get ta home? Someone I can call for ye, lass?”

I hiccupped, piss drunk. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“I’ll walk,” I declared, figuring that one of us could come back for the car on foot. I wasn’t so drunk that I couldn’t realize my two-word sentence dissolved came out in a single syllable.

“I willna let that happen, lass. Ye’ve had too much to walk wherever it is ye’re headed.”

I couldn’t call Jamie. I couldn’t face him.

“Taxi then.”

The man laughed. “Ye think this town has a taxi service?”

“Da, I’ll take her back; she’s staying wi’ Jamie Fraser on Fletcher’s Run.”

I looked at the source – it was a boy, no more than seventeen. He was a server from the restaurant the night before. Did everyone know Jamie in this town?

“My son’ll take ye to yer cottage, aye? He can drive ye.”

I had assented and allowed my chauffeur to help me into my coat.  I was a mess – bloody, muddy, covered in leaves, swollen from crying.  If I had cared enough to look I’m sure the boy’s face would have lit up when he saw the car he’d be driving, but I didn’t care. I just closed my eyes and focused on not vomiting in Jamie’s expensive car.

When I was finally inside the cottage, Jamie was on me in an instant. His expression changed wildly only over a few moments.  First stony ( _emotionless, detached, cool, ordinary_ ), then frustrated ( _a quiet rage burning deep beneath the surface, eyes narrowed into slits, a tension ready to snap inside of him_ ), then finally resting on worried ( _brows knit together, lips parted, eyes wide and searching_ ).  

“Claire. _Ifrinn_.  Where in the hell have ye been?” Jamie asked from the living room when I came in the door. “Ye said ye’d be back for lunch. Ye haven’t answered a one of my calls. It’s 5:30.”

I steadied myself on the wall and I stared at my fingers for a moment.

“Are ye completely blitzed then?”

“Aye, that I am, Lord Broch Tuarach,” I mumbled, an undeserved derision in my voice.

“Did ye drive back here like this?”

“No. Some guy from the bar gave me a ride; your car is out front.” I swayed against the wall, trying my damnedest to stay upright.

“ _Some guy_?” he asked incredulously, his voice green with a touch of jealousy. Jamie’s face said that he was not worried anymore. He was climbing the ranks from a simmering irritation to a boiling fury.

“Oh cool it. He was a fucking teenager and apparently knew you.”  I peeled one boot off, refusing to look at him. I concentrated instead on separating the chewed up blisters on the backs of my heels from my socks.

“Well, ye didna know the lad. I dinna ken how ye could be so reckless with what I love most, Claire,” Jamie snapped at me, his voice taking on a tone I had never heard before.

‘ _Make me feel something different_ ,’ my brain demanded. ‘ _Get him mad, force a reaction_. _Pick a fight._ ’  A part of me made ugly by this situation wanted him to yell at me.

He was annoyed that I had endangered what he loved most?

“Well, the car’s _fine_ ,” I spat back with equal venom, my words slurred.

“You can’t be fucking serious,” he muttered, he raised both hands to his head and laced the fingers into his hair.  His t-shirt rose, exposing a small sliver of his stomach. “Claire Beauchamp… I ken ye’re going through something. I’m trying my best to be patient wi’ ye.”

The feeling of wanting him to be mad at me was like a poison sloshing in my belly with all of the whisky. I leaned against the wall to take my weight from my injured ankle as I removed my second boot. He wasn’t angry, but I could tell that his frustration was growing.

“If ye think that car’s what’s most precious to me… well, we have something verra seriously wrong with this relationship, Claire.”

My breath was gone for the second time that day. I had gotten _exactly_ the reaction I was looking for, but I had not gotten the feeling inside that I’d needed – a distraction from the pain. The way he said my name – no love in the word, none of the usual reverence – was enough to snap me out of it.

When I stood straight, I started to cry, massive shaking sobs drawn from my gut almost immediately. My stupid hands – the ones that killed Marianne – hung limply at my sides, just as they had when after she died. Jamie walked to me without hesitation, but didn’t touch me. I felt his warmth for a few moments before I closed the gap, pressing my dirty body to his pajama-clad one.

It took me a moment before I could mutter the closest thing to an apology that I had: “I knew you didn’t mean the car.”

“I ken what ye’re trying to do, make me rage at ye… and I dinna mean to make ye cry.” His hands were in my hair, just resting against my scalp and holding my face to his chest.

“I’m not crying because of what you said, Jamie.”

He didn’t say anything else and just held me.

The words came this time before I could close my eyes: “It was not my fault.”

Oh God, I was _crying, really crying_ now –tears hot and breath hitching.

I recognized my voice this time – a little drunk, but it was mine.

Once it was out, I said it again and again. “It was not my fault. It was not my fault. I did not do this.”

I don’t know how many times I said it and said it and said it again until my mouth was dry and the tears quit falling. I stood with my face pressed in his damp shirt for an eternity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one was brutal for me to write. I can’t thank @kkruml enough. Over the last few days I’ve put her through her paces - I made her read parts 1 through 5, I made her listen to me ramble, I made her beta this, and then she had to listen to me ramble after she finished before this was posted. She is a true gem.
> 
> I had originally said Loss would be four parts. It was a lie. Then I said six parts. That was also a lie. I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll just say: “I’ll tell you when it’s done by writing ‘the end.’”  


	7. Part Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This part has NSFW bits in it. If that’s not your thing and you’d like to read sans the NSFW parts, hit me up.  I can email you an edited version. Because Claire Belle cares. Though, I’m sure you can figure out where you want to stop reading as much as I can. I think there’s plot and character development in this NSFW, though. ;)
> 
> @kkruml: My gratitude as always for the help getting this to where it should go. <3

 

 

##  **Loss (Modern AU)  
** **Part 7**

Jamie’s face was intent as he carefully used tweezers to extract bits of earth from my palm.  He nearly had a doctor’s way about him: his hand cupping mine gentle and firm, his demeanor calm and soothing. Despite my careful washing at the pub, remnants of my fall were embedded in the flesh of my hand – mostly the tips of pine needles and grit.  When he nudged a particularly tender gouge I flinched and hissed out a curse word _._  Jamie held my hand firm and kept his grip steady.    

“Sorry, Sassenach,” he said simply, sounding at once apologetic and yet not.

“It’s okay,” I responded, relaxing my hand in his and gripping the porcelain bathtub with my free hand.  I needed to keep the earth from tilting on its axis. Eyes closed, I diverted my attentions from the sensation of Jamie plucking forest floor from my flesh. Rather, I willed myself not to empty the whisky in my belly in a spectacular explosion all over this hulking man kneeling on the bathroom floor.

When his able hands stilled, I opened one eye and looked down.  

“Here…” I took the tweezers from him and set about removing a few smaller bits of grit that he had managed to miss despite his close attentions. All in all, I was impressed with his work.  

When I finished, I rose to wash my hands and smear a thin layer of antibiotic ointment over the abstract pattern of lacerations.

“Will you wrap it? Fairly loose, not much tension.”  Sufficiently lubricated and smelling like a medicine cabinet, I sat back down on the toilet seat lid and held my hand out again. “Please?”

Jamie nodded and wordlessly set about situating a pad of gauze and securing it with steady, warm fingers.  One loop over my palm and thumb, one loop under, one loop around, and finally the end tucked into the top.

When he was satisfied with his work, he raised my hand and our eyes locked as he pressed his lips into the soft mound of white gauze. 

I knew he was trying to create a moment, to seal as a done deal my absolution from earlier in the entryway.  But I was drunk and unable to fully slam shut the door. I closed my eyes and burped, a revolting mixture of stomach acid and whisky threatening to flood my mouth.  I swallowed hard.

Jamie snorted, placing my hand down on my lap.

“Ye may feel better with all that whisky out than in.”

My mouth was sweating – urging me to take his advice.  I shook my head, eyes cinched shut. I did not want to hear anything about whisky or anything in the whisky family. 

“Ye smell like a distillery and I think ye’re slurring yer words more than ye realize.”

I did not want to think about the amount of booze it had taken to bend and damn near break my cognition. Left to my own devices – and at home – I drank red wine, usually in moderation, and would humor Jamie by sampling whisky.  Left to my own devices – sad, and in the Highlands – I would apparently drink whisky to excess like I was his kin.  

“Why do we no’ get ye some water, some snacks? Then some sleep.”

I opened my eyes and shook my head. “I hate the word ‘snacks.’”

“I ken ye do,” he snorted as he raised a single eyebrow. We had apparently reached the part of the night’s program where Jamie was going to be purposefully testy.

I used my grip on the tub as leverage to stand and wobbled slightly.  Jamie stayed crouched on the floor for a moment and leaned forward, his lips pressing just above my beltline.

“Are ye done bein’ reckless with my favorite person?” he asked, looking up at me. His words were muffled by my sweater. He mispronounced my last name when he unnecessarily clarified, “My favorite person is Claire Beauchamp, by the way.”

I could tell that there was more that he wanted to say, more that he needed to say, but that he was merely contenting himself with this simple request for affirmation right now. I stepped back, running a hand over his cheek.  

“I’m done being reckless, yes.” I stopped, studying him. His expression was suspended somewhere between affection and confusion. “But I can’t promise you I’m _me_ yet.”  

“Fair enough,” he responded simply. “So, Sassenach… _snacks_?”

Rolling my eyes at everything about his last request, I relented.  

“Snacks” were a quick affair – sandwiches on dry brown bread for us both and a seemingly bottomless glass of water for me.  Jamie ate his sandwich in five bites and just watched with a smirk as I deconstructed mine to eat just the cheese.  Between the sway in my limbs from the alcohol and the emotional exhaustion of taking in the weight of how I had made him feel, I was exhausted down to my bones.

I finished choking down my water and tried not to seem surprised when he followed me to the bedroom. When we settled into bed, he slipped his arms around me.  I was quickly taken by the warmth of his body, the weight of his fingers splaying across me and the sound of him inhaling at my neck.  Sleep took me before I was able to situate myself against the pillow, limbs heavy and mind foggy.

When I woke up, slowly battling my way out of quicksand, the bedroom was dark except for the light from the lamp on Jamie’s side of the bed. It took a moment for the realization to hit me that my head was aching slightly with a dull, base-of-the-skull pressure that’s only barely there. My mouth was tacky and I noted that I had not moved an inch since Jamie and I had settled into bed.

I hadn’t had a hangover from day drinking in years, but the feeling was of incontestable origin.

I had no sense of time – how long I had been asleep, how long ago Jamie had moved away from me on the bed, how much longer it was until dawn.

Jamie was sitting next to me, legs crossed at the ankles and reading.

“Ye didna sleep long,” he commented blandly before I could get any words out.

I squinted at the clock. It was 9:30. I had only been asleep for two hours.  “Well, alcohol disrupts REM sleep.”

He made a sound low in his throat.  “Yer stomach’s no’ been quiet for the last hour, Claire.”

“You’re really tending to my baser needs today, huh? Feeding me, watering me, cleaning me up.” I was trying to be purposefully light and falling flat.

“Weel, ye dinna seem like ye’re doin’ the best for yerself right now.” His voice did not have an edge, but he was not going to take my bait and insert some false levity into a forced conversation.  He rose from the bed, ruffling his hair, before I could respond.  “I’m goin’ to make somethin’ to eat.  Come out if ye want.”

I could only swallow and nod. When he was out of the door, I curled myself around his pillow and closed my eyes, listening to him bang around in the kitchen.  At the sound of plates on the counter, I finally got out of bed and slipped into fresh clothes.  He was sitting at the table, already eating eggs and toast, staring at an identical plate at the opposite end of the table.  I sat, carefully arranging a napkin on my lap before taking a bite.

I needed desperately to reset the equilibrium between us – he needed to be heard or to give up whatever was brewing inside of him.

I decided to try for a joke.

  
“Well, one thing can be said for that fall. Now my outsides match my insides, huh.”  For the first time in my life I made a sound best described as a _chuckle_ – a mirthless, flat half-snorting sound. I’m sure if I’d looked in a mirror no humor would have reached my eyes. At the sound, Jamie’s expression hardened, going from neutral to impassive.

“Can I speak to ye freely?”

I hated responding to questions with questions, but something in his inquiry made the hairs on the back of my wrist stand at attention. My response was soft. “Do you really feel like you have to ask for permission?”

“Well… I canna say that what’s on my mind is—”  

a pause, a breath, blue eyes searching my face for _something_ –

“a kindness to ye, Sassenach.”

“Well, now you have to tell me.” My heart was pumping and my remaining intoxication blurred my thoughts.

“Ye’re no’ goin’ to like this, and I ken that it’s manipulative, but I need to say something.”

“Please,” I said, gesturing with a forkful of egg.

“I got to thinkin’ when I was watchin’ ye sleep. I ken ye’re hurtin’, and I dinna mean to take away from that, but ye pissed me off today, Claire.”  

His jaw was set, his face like stone.  

“Ye get it in yer mind to do as ye damn well please. Ye pay me no mind; ye dinna call or text.  Ye dinna think of how ye might leave me feeling as empty and hopeless as ye feel right now.”

“Jamie I –”

“I’m no’ finished, Claire. I’m no idiot. I kent ye were out drinking. Ye had that car, ye had a head full of noise, and ye didna call. Ye could have ended up dead, too, and then I’d be a mess – grappling with worse than anything either of us have ever felt. Did ye think of _any_ of that?”

My voice was uncharacteristically quiet when I whispered, “I didn’t want you to worry.”

“And yet you disappeared for almost nine hours. Ye show up here, babbling about ‘ _some guy_ ’ ye trusted with yer life to bring ye back… back to me. Ye… ye dinna think to call me, dinna ask me to come get ye or find some sort of way to get ye safely back here.”

He gave me a moment – I wasn’t sure if the moment was to allow his words to sink in or to give me a chance to respond with _something, anything_.  My mouth opened.  My mouth closed.  I was like a fish at the edge of a tank, just breathing in water.

“I ken ye need to process, to figure this out on your own without me looking over yer shoulder, but _fuck_ …”

He paused.

“And ye had the unrepentant gall to talk to me about how the car is what I love most? Ye’re tearing my guts out, Claire.”

“I’m sorry.”  And I was.

“I dinna need yer apology, but I need yer commitment that ye’ll not be reckless.”

“Fine.”

“Does fine mean ‘yes’?” His tone was flat and the flat line of his lips showed me that he was unconvinced.

“Yes, it means _yes_.”

We finished our eggs without speaking and retreated in a mutually-accepted silence to brush our teeth for bed.  When we were finished, our routine the same as it had been on hundreds of nights before, I let Jamie wrap his arms around me. He tucked his face into me and began to move his lips over my neck.  After a few moments he mumbled, “I cannae lose ye.”

My throat was paralyzed so I just nodded, my chin bumping his temple. I was suddenly convinced that he _did_ need an apology, as much as I needed our connection.

“I am sorry, Jamie.”

With his face against me I suddenly remembered how he tasted ( _tangy, warm_ ), how his skin felt ( _smooth and soft, encasing planes of muscle, power_ ), how his body weight felt over me ( _protective, comforting_ ). These memories had been burned into me over the year and a half we had been together, but the realization of them was startling in the moment. I needed him – more than air, more than daylight. The jolt of the realization ran a circuit up and down my spine and I felt my heart began to hammer, barely contained by my ribcage.

“Say it again.” His words were lower this time and he had started to move his lips with more purpose – suctioning to me, pressing and marking.

“I am sorry,” I whispered a second time.  

Something broke in him then, his hands slipping around my waist and urging my body to meet his in the middle. His pent up fear and frustration at my day of exiled silence drained out of his touch. My fingers crept beneath the hem of his t-shirt to seek out skin, to find a way to ground myself, to heal.  

“I need to see ye, Claire.”  

Without prompting, I lifted the hem of my t-shirt.  He had my pants off before I had the t-shirt all the way over my head. Stepping back, he looked me up and down.  For the first time since I walked back in the door of the cottage he did not look like he was holding his breath.  

Goosebumps rose on my forearms, my stomach, the backs of my hands at his words and the way he was drinking me in.  

The words fell out of me before I knew they were true: “I need _you_.”

In response, Jamie crushed himself to me, his lips slamming down onto mine.  His mouth granted itself access to mine and our tongues fought for what felt like hours. I tasted his toothpaste when his tongue pushed into mine.  His face hovered not even a breath from mine when he pulled back.  

“Dinna fight me.” He spoke directly into my mouth – the words slipping down my throat and into my chest. He moved into me again, his lips insistent.  This time our tongues did not battle, but met instead in a probing, furious rhythm. The sound he made when I sank my fingernails into his shoulders melted seamlessly into the groan that rose from my belly and slipped out of my lips. It was the two of us, but one noise.

When he lifted me, I wound myself around him, seeking heat.  He stumbled a little as he turned us into the hall and I sank my fingertips into the muscle over his shoulders.  He hissed into my mouth and bit the swell of my lip. The Jamie who had been tender and sweet with me – making love to me slowly and gently – was gone completely.  In his place was a man who loved me just as much, but had a growing fury in him.

Jamie dropped me onto the bed unceremoniously and I felt like I had been created to exist forever as a heady mix of want, need, desperation. His usual grace and self-awareness was missing in the fog of whatever this emotion he had coursing through his veins. For a moment he stood over me, just looking at me. I was all at once tingling, expanding and contracting.

His brows were pinched and his lips set.

“I need ye, too, and ye ken that’s why I’m so angry.”  His affirmation was belated, but nonetheless poignant. I felt a warm flutter in my belly at his words. _Anger_.

“Show me you need me,” I whispered, my voice unsteady, needy. I wanted it _all_ – every bit of his passion, all of his frustration with me.  I wanted to own it completely, to feel it until we burned and broke on the bed, sweaty and spent.

Jamie moved to sit astride me and leaned forward until the length of his body was hovering above mine. He spread my legs with a knee and he brought down fingers to run over me, just a test. And then he was inside of me, stilling completely before pulling back and removing the warmth blooming in my belly.

“Jamie… please….”

“Please what?”

He sank into me again, slow and steady. He was teasing, intentional.

I just made a quiet noise and reached for him, finding his left hip and his right flank. He rose up, slipping out of me and onto my belly, his hands quick to catch me by the wrists.

“Please _what_?” he repeated, leaning close enough that I could feel the outermost curve of his lower lip on mine when he spoke.  He maneuvered my wrists above my head and pressed them down into the mattress.  In this moment, Jamie was not cautious; he was purposeful – every muscle under his control, every sound and breath measured. I needed his control to snap and with the breaking, to have him discard into me his all of his wanting, his worry and in the process take all of mine.

“Please make love to me,” I whimpered, feeling a flush and a groan of profanity building in my belly at the control he had somehow mastered.  He must have been absolutely furious with me.

“Claire, that’s what I’m doing.” I could hear the laughter in his voice.  

Jamie learned forward, loosening my wrists that had fallen limp into the mattress. My mouth fought the submission of my wrists and I turned to sink my teeth into his forearm.

“ _A dhia_.” He groaned and jerked back from my mouth.

“ _Move_ ,” I ordered in response, wiggling against him.

This time he obliged, but he made his own demand in return: “Give me yer mouth, Sassenach.”

I did, willingly, and rose to meet his lips. Against his mouth, his body, I was finding my way out of the abyss.  He was measured, moving like he knew he would not break me.  He took what he needed from me and there was no pretense about what he was doing to me.

“Christ, I dinna ken where ye end…” he groaned, his teeth raking over my jawline as my hips arched to meet his. “And… fuck…”

He couldn’t finish, but I knew the thought before he even spoke it: I did not know where he ended and I began, either.  

Deep in my belly I coiled against the slow friction of our bodies, his tease.  My hands sank into his hair, gripping as I arched into him, mouth open.  When he reached between us I was off, spiraling off into the floating feeling he created in me. White light swelled and constricted, exploding and pulsing behind my eyelids.

There was no Jamie.  There was no Claire.  There was only _this moment_ , these bodies joining and dissolving.

I was barely aware of his own release, spiraling down with limbs growing roots into the mattress.

It felt like days passed before I could speak again. Jamie was on his stomach, his neck at an awkward angle and face crushing one of my breasts. With the way that his fingers spread across my abdomen it seemed that he was attempting to get the full span of me under a single hand.

“Jamie?”

The only response was his quiet “ _mmmph_.”

I shifted, turning, a careful hand on his cheek to steady his head.  He rearranged his own position, pressing his face into the crook of my neck and slipping his hand over my hip.

“I’m rebuilding.  Little by little.”

His warm fingertips moved up the curve of my hip, the dip in my waist, the rise of my ribs, and came to rest just over the hollow above my collarbone, thumb above my heart. “That lean-to? Ye’ve got one, then?”

Sober now, committed and somewhat renewed, I responded, “A roof to keep out the rain, yes.”

Jamie kissed me, as if to say “ _thank god_ ” or “ _good_.” We spent the balance of the night talking about everything and nothing at all until Jamie fell asleep well into the night, warm lips pressed into my throat.

I laid, sleepless until dawn, just touching his hair, studying his sleeping face, and thinking.  

 


	8. Part 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roadtrip over, Claire goes back to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This part has a NSFW bit in it. If that’s not your thing and you’d like to read sans the NSFW parts, hit me up.  I can email you an edited version. Because Claire Belle cares. 
> 
> As always thank you a million times over for @kkruml for being the guardian over me and this process. I love you and the help you provide me is invaluable.

******Loss (Modern AU)  
** **Part Eight**

It was raining on Tuesday when I woke up at one in the morning – three hours before I was supposed to be at work. For the first time since the night I came home an absolute broken jumble of chaos, Jamie and I were back in our own bed. 

Our trip home had been solemn – low music, mostly instrumental. It swelled and faded and covered our silence. Halfway back to Edinburgh, I turned the radio off, using the newfound silence to confess that I was absolutely terrified at the prospect of returning to an operating room. To have someone’s life in my hands, to have responsibility for the lives of everyone who loved my patient. Jamie stayed silent and threaded his fingers through mine, somehow knowing that platitudes about my _talent_ and _determination_ were not going to help.

Now, awake early and in our bed, I laid stock still staring at the ceiling.  Jamie was on his stomach next to me, his arm heavy over my middle and his lips releasing even streams of warm breath on my shoulder. Thunder rolled in the distance and I tried to convince myself that “oncoming storm” was not going to be the theme for my first day back at the hospital.

The tips of my fingers absently traced lines along the curves of his muscular forearm. The names of each muscle were stuck at the back of my throat. Marianne was lingering and burning at the perimeter of my subconscious, glimpses of her eyes or smile flickering there as I visualized the procedure I would be performing in a few short hours.  

We were home.  Jamie had to return to work today.  I had to cut into a human today.

I was easing back in with a routine knee replacement. I went step-by-step through the surgery in my head, thought back to the films, tried to remember the first time I had seen a knee opened by a scalpel, thought about the procedures I had performed.

The last time I was in an operating room – standing over Marianne’s lifeless body – I had been stripped of my confidence.  

She entered my operating room on a gurney, chatting and laughing nervously.  Her uninjured hand, chapped with a chemical burn from the explosion of the airbag, tested her injured shoulder.  Wincing, but smiling, laughing and giving me the thumbs up as she went under.  

When she was lost, a pall of silence had descended over the operating room, my heartbeat hammering and echoing with a crescendo in my ears. Since that moment, a sense of incredulity at the loss made my mind writhe and twist like a fish out of water.  Shame, burning and pulsing, made me cry uncontrollably in the shower that evening, and a bone-deep fatigue had led me to fully break against the rocky shore of my new reality.  Jamie had been there to steady me, to let me figure it out on my own.  

She exited my operating room on a gurney draped in a sheet.  Her broken body hidden and lifeless.

The _guilt_ and _shame_ inside of me over her death and _all that it wrought_ had given way to a new, undefinable and infinitely complex sadness.

Back in our bed, time seemed like it had ceased to pass as I stroked Jamie’s arm. Eventually, I slipped two fingers beneath his wrist. With my eyes fluttering closed and Jamie’s pulse point thrumming evenly above my fingers, I tentatively wondered if I could be good at something other than surgery. Some other profession, another specialty. Something that would not require me to open a sleeping patient’s skin.  Law or endocrinology.  Gastroenterology or teaching.  Hospital administration or infectious disease.  

No, I decided- firm in my conviction. I had talent for this, for healing, for surgery. The passion was still there. I resolved to fight to regain my confidence. 

Bleating and chattering, the alarm on my phone went off and I shifted under Jamie’s arm to slap it into silence.  The last few hours had slipped by – both at a glacial pace and far too quickly.  It was time to get ready, to face my demons head first.

“Sassenach?” Jamie mumbled sleepily, the laxness of sleep leaving his body as every muscle tensed against me, arching.  He woke slowly, like a child on an early morning. Jamie’s lips moved over my shoulder. After a minute of stretching and sighing against me, he spoke again. “Do ye want some breakfast? Toast and jam? An egg?”

“No,” I sighed, turning my body sideways and slipping further under the sheets, pressing my front to him.  His arm readjusted to drape over my waist.  “Treat me like this is a normal weekday.  Take a clinical disinterest in me and what I eat as I walk out the door.”

It took Jamie another moment, but he curled closer into me, his sleepy hands moving south.  He dozed off again after hitching our bodies together.  I allowed myself to luxuriate in his closeness for a moment before slipping free of his grasp.

Even over the sound of the shower, the thunder was at a low, constant rumble.  By the time I started to dry myself, the rain sounded like it is not wetting the pavement, but rather falling into already-formed puddles and rivers on the sidewalks. Wiping a hand through the condensation on the mirror, I recognized the person looking back at me.  I kept my eyes on that person as I applied minimal makeup and smeared on some lotion.

“It was not your fault,” I whispered, fingers curved around the sink to steady myself.  I said it again.  And again until I heard Jamie stirring in the bedroom. 

Although the two steaming mugs of coffee on my nightstand established that Jamie had left our bed while I showered, he blinked at me sleepily.  He watched me dress through half-hooded eyes with his arm cradling his head.  I moved slowly, deliberately, and gratefully took a long pull of the coffee.  I imagined that he was trying to work out whether he should say something to me about the day. 

Once dressed, I sat on the edge of the bed, with my necklace in hand. I was suddenly struck by how just a few days earlier I had been sitting in this spot while Jamie dressed me after we showered together.  I had been so broken then, tilting on my axis and eroding at the surface.  Jamie had guided my uncooperative limbs through fabric, smoothed my hair down, and tended to me when I could not tend to myself.  

Now, with hands trembling, I felt stuck on the memory. It replayed over and over and over again. I felt Jamie’s presence loom up and over me from behind before he wedged my body between his legs. His arms ghosted over mine and he took the necklace from my unsteady fingers.

Lips pressed to my skull through a sea of shower-damp curls, which he pushed aside. With a sureness born of countless mornings following this same routine, he fastened the necklace around my neck.  

 _Normal_. I had asked for this.  It was somehow all at once _just right_ and _not enough_.

Jamie’s fingers were dry and sure. Feeling the familiar _click_ of the silver chain, he moved his lips over the clasp and kissed it.

Holding up my hands, I stared at them, and managed to ask, “How will I do it? I cannot stop shaking.”  

His chin moved to my shoulder and he brought his hands around the front of me, resting them palms up on my thighs.  “Give me yer hands.”

Without hesitation I rested my palms on top of his. Neither of us moved, warmth soaking into warmth, calm, for a long few minutes.

“There.   _Stillness_.”  It had not taken long and I marveled for a moment at his effect on me. “I’ve every confidence in ye, Sassenach. Find that confidence for yerself and ye’re going to be better than fine.”

I fought the urge to call him a name – Yoda or Dumbledore or something silly.  But the words failed in my throat because the moment was _just right_.  Our hands together, the world stilled.  The patter of rain blended into the white noise of his breathing, my breathing, the thunder.  After a time, I laced my quietened fingers through his.   

 _Stillness_.

I walked to the hospital with earbuds in, the rain coming at me sideways under my umbrella.  When I arrived, I changed into scrubs and a coat, visited my patient, and readied for the day.

Between the butterflies in my stomach and the desert in my mouth, I was back where I had been the first time I was allowed to do more than suture an incision.  I felt like I was walking against oncoming traffic with one eye closed.

The early morning hours flew by and I found myself preparing myself for surgery with a pounding heart.  

I followed the same steps I had hundreds of times. Arranging unruly curls under a cap, stuffing. Scrubbing my skin until it was raw and pink, almost aching.  Being wrapped by a nurse – surgical gown, gloves, visor, mask. I almost did not realize that it was time until it was over and I was standing in the operating room.

I allowed myself to fall under the spell of the ceremony, falling into an almost trance-like state.

The anesthesiologist started the process of taking our patient ( _David MacKimmie, forty-three, with the brown puppy dog eyes_ ) under and I whispered an affirmation to him.   _We will see you on the other side._ He blinked and smiled, and then he was slack and pliable, and it was my turn.

 _Breathe in, Claire_.

Fingers on the scalpel – heavy and hard in my hand, impossibly sharp.  Eyes on flesh that was waiting for me to slip the blade through skin and fat and muscle to get to bone. I stood, dumb and frozen, for a series of moments.

_Breathe out, Claire._

My eyes flicked to the clock on the wall.  

I had been standing just steadying my breathing, counting each inhale and exhale, for exactly one hundred and twenty-seven seconds. 

My hand was suspended over my patient’s waiting body. He was well under the magic of the anesthesiologist’s syringes and juices. Paper tape held the tube to his lips, slightly parted and already chapped. His lips were silent as to the promises he had yet to keep, the hopes he had for his young daughter ( _the one with brown curls who kissed him enthusiastically on the mouth and said “see you soon da!”_ ), and the secrets he would someday divulge. 

_Breathe in, Claire._

I emptied my mind – the recurring yoga membership that I had to cancel, the load of laundry I had not yet started from our trip, the way our coffee breath had canceled out when Jamie kissed me before I left our flat, and _finally_ Marianne.  I mumbled a prayer into my mask and then abandoned that, too.

_Breathe out, Claire._

It was going to be okay. I pressed the blade into the prepared surface, carefully, letting my training and instinct take over.

  _Breathe in, Claire._

 The scalpel was the extension of my hand.  A scope took the place of my eyes.  A curette scraped at tissue when some finesse was required.

_Breathe out, Claire._

 And finally, I was closing him – drawing the flesh back together over his new knee.  

  _Breathe in, Claire.  Breathe out, Claire._

The resident next to me, apparently expecting to play more of a role than potted plan in the procedure, muttered something under his breath.  I allowed a flicker of gratitude for the anesthesiologist when he snapped at the resident to “ _shut the fuck up and let Dr. Beauchamp finish this_.”

_Breathe, just breathe._

A clean line of stitches and knots.  Monitors still plugging along as expected – even. They beeped and clicked, the sounds blending together as I finished.

 _Relief_. Adrenaline.  Bladder bursting at the seams. Hunger.  Thirst.  The pile of laundry.   _Jamie_.  The yoga membership.   _Marianne_.

I stepped back, staring at my patient as the nurses prepared him to roll out of my operating room and into a post-anesthesia recovery unit for observation.  There he would come out of the fog and feel the exquisite pain of post-surgical _aliveness_.  

I stared down at my hands and carefully removed my left glove, pinching it at the wrist and rolling it up and into itself before removing my right glove.   

 _Stillness_. 

“Dr. Beauchamp… Claire…”  

I looked up from my hands and dropped them to my side. “Huh?”

The anesthesiologist’s mask was still in place but I could see the fine lines his smile etched along the corners of his eyes. “The first one back after something like what happened is the hardest.  I hope ye ken that ye’re a braw surgeon.”

“Thank you,” I breathed out.

_Done._

“ _Breathe_ ,” I whispered to myself in the shower as I scrubbed myself clean. When I cried, this time it felt like relief.

The rest of my day was a blur – other patients, checking in on Mr. MacKimmie, a lunch with Joe where we did not talk about my loss, and mountains of paperwork.  

It was still drizzling when I left the hospital to walk home, but I left my umbrella and jacket in my bag.  I relished the feeling of the mist on my cheeks and bare arms.  

By the time that I arrived at the flat the sky had cracked. Fat cold raindrops splattered against my skin and I was soaked to the bone well before I made it home. Standing in a silvery puddle and staring up at the inky early-evening sky, I dug my mobile out of my pocket and called Jamie.  

I did not bother to say _hi_.

“The light is on… are you home?”

“Aye.  I’m on the couch watching rugby.  Ye’re here?” He was confused.

I could not keep the smile out of my voice.  “I’m downstairs.  Come see me.”

“What?” he asked.  I could hear the question in his voice, but heard the familiar creak of the hinges on our door as it opened.  “It’s raining…”

“I _know_ – it’s great.”

When he made it to the front door he kept the phone to his ear, just watching me from the door.

I dropped my phone back into my pocket and held out my hand. I felt like I was part of the world again and I wanted him to join me in the moment. It was about to be winter and I felt myself coming alive.  

“Come here.”

“Claire, have ye gone mad? It’s–”

“–just come here and–”  

“– _November_ and ye’re in the rain… in a t-shirt.”

 “Just _come here_ ,” I repeated, my lips stretched by a smile.

He looked thoroughly perplexed when he stuffed his phone into his pocket and took the stairs down to the sidewalk – lips tight, eyes narrowed, shoulders tensed.  When he was in front of me I grabbed his hands and pulled him towards me so our bodies were seamed together.  

“ _I did it_ ,” rolled off of my tongue. I felt almost high – adrenaline mingling with a rekindled surgeon’s hubris.  All of it was growing in my gut.  

“I’m _proud_ ,” he responded, softening against me and bringing his hands around my waist. His hair was already darkened by the cold, late–autumn rain that was falling relentlessly. I sank my fingers into the curling locks, contouring my fingers to his scalp. “I kent ye could.”

“Yeah?” My request for the affirmation was low, husky.

His nod was interrupted by my mouth, hungry and on his lips. One hand slipped from his hair and sought out his forearm. It was slick and cool, the almost-blonde hairs rising under my touch. His muscles contracted and I arched into him, pulling his head down to meet my height.   

“Take me upstairs,” I breathed, stomach twisting. He pulled back just slightly, his respiration rate elevated ever-so-slightly.  “I feel _so_ good, and I want it to last.”

His thumb found my cheekbone and he smudged the rain water across it before pressing his lips to my forehead. “Ye even look different… awake. _Happy_.” 

With that, he led the way up the stairs and I skated my fingers across the expanse of his upper back as he unlocked the door.  I saw the gooseflesh rise on his bare arms as he fumbled with the keys.  

“C’mon Fraser… some dexterity will be required for what I’ve got in store for you.” 

When he finally got the door to open, I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him until his back was against the mailboxes.  For a moment he allowed me control before twisting his fingers into my hair and arching my head back to expose my neck.  I dissolved into nothingness as his mouth found the curve of my throat.

After a moment, my eyes opened and darted around the entryway. I made the assessment that we were out of view of the cameras and I dipped a hand into the back of his jeans to cup him, pulling him closer to me.  Faltering, his lips came to the neckline of my t-shirt.  The laugh of surprise that came from him was muffled in the damp fabric.  

Steady hands pushed me back until we were standing apart. “ _Up… stairs._ ”   

His hand wrapped easily around my wrist and he tugged me towards the stairs.  On the first landing he returned the favor, maneuvering me so my back was pressed against the wall, his hands on my thighs and mouth over mine making a statement, not asking a question.  

“Hypocrite,” I teased against his mouth when his hand found my breast through my t-shirt.  “ _Upstairs, upstairs, upstairs_.”

Just barely inside of the door to our flat, we attempted to divest each other of our clothing, laughing and drunk on each other. Jamie fell to his knees, easily unbuttoning and unzipping my soaked jeans.  

“ _A Dhia._ It’s like peeling a fuckin’ orange,” he grumbled, fighting to get the denim down my damp thighs. “Did ye swim home?”

“Just get them off,” I hissed impatiently, fingers sinking into his hair.  With the jeans at the middle of my thighs he snapped “ _unnecessary_ ” and brought his mouth to me, my knickers just slipped to the side by his nose.  My toes curled inside of my shoes and I cried his name at a volume that made me think we could expect a note from our neighbor.

I stumbled backwards into the coat closet as he triumphantly pulled the jeans down with an almost violent yank.

We managed to make it no further than the couch, clothes littering our path.

It was different than the last time we had come together in a hunger for closeness.  He had been so angry with me for leaving him wondering about me all day.  I had been so needy for him – just tentatively exploring the possibility that I could bounce back.

This was just fun – a need for completion and release punctuated by laughter and sloppy kissing and demanding hands meeting pliable limbs.  

I finished first, straddling him on the couch with my fingers on his shoulders and his hand between my thighs, collapsing against his rain and sweat-slicked chest.  He finished with a muttered string of profanity, pulling me down onto him with such a strength that I felt like I was going to break.  We melted into each other for a long time, heartbeats warring and then slowing and nearly synchronizing.  

Face against his neck, I realize that I had returned to the scene of my undoing – where I had sought comfort against the line of his body and confessed my loss to him.

His hand lazily stroked up my spine and came to rest along the curve where my skull met the back of my neck.

“Now is no’ the right time, but I ken I need to ask before I forget…”

His voice trailed off into a sigh when I shifted just enough to reach for a blanket.  I carefully wrapped it around my shoulders and tucked it over him, not leaving his lap.  I wanted to stay there forever.  

“Christmas… what do ye want to do? It’s only a few weeks now…”

With everything going on, I had almost forgotten. The rush of Christmas at Lallybroch came over me – the glow of candles on ice-glazed window panes, fresh pine garland draped over rich wood surfaces, unexpected balls of mistletoe in doorways, roasted chestnuts and sugary confections in red and green, and a crackling inferno in the fireplace.   _Home_.  A family I never thought I would have.

Mind still humming, I sighed, “Let’s go _home_.”

“Sounds fine to me,” he sighed after a bit. “We can stay in, pack up gifts and post them off to the kids.”

With a jolt of unexpected energy, I pulled back. “Jamie, I want to _go_ to Lallybroch.  This is _our_ home, but _that_ is also home.” 

The look on his face threatened to split me in half – a half-smile, a light in his eyes.

 All he said was: “ _Oh_.”  


	9. Part Nine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not required reading, but this part refers to discussions in the ficlet Afghanistan.
> 
> @kkruml basically deserves a co-author credit on this. And I owe her big time for being my sounding board and idea machine.

 

##  **Loss (Modern AU)**

**Part 9**

The snow covered Lallybroch like a layer of crushed feathers, thick and soft and billowing behind the car as we came up the drive. The skeletal arms of trees and hedges reached for sky through the snow, demarcating the driveway from the rolling lawns hidden under the fresh coating of powder.  It was an unusually thick icing on the landscape; it was picturesque and perfect for Christmas.

Of course, I had been to Lallybroch when snow blanketed the ground, but I had never seen the estate freshly coated and sparkling like a wonderland. It made things feel pure, preserved.  

The sight took my breath away and the hint of a smile playing on Jamie’s lips warmed me.  

_Jamie was **home**._

“The fact that ye wanted to come here…” His words faded away, eyes focused on the car’s path through the snow. I allowed myself to fixate on his profile – high cheekbones, chiseled jaw, thin lines of a smile that climbed up out of the depths of his gut. The end of his thought hung in the air between us, unsaid, but I could hear the note of wonder in this voice. This was where I would feel _whole_ again and we both knew it.

I had to look away.

I could feel his eyes on me but I could not meet his gaze.  

I was not afraid of what I would see – I _knew_ the expression on his face without even seeing it.

_I was **home** , too_.

We parked where the driveway curved around the house and just sat together for a moment, our hands linked over the gearshift.  After a while, Jamie pulled on gloves and gave me a quick kiss.

“Happy Christmas Eve Eve, Sassenach.”  It was barely a whisper.  

When he started to pull back, I grabbed the back of his neck and held him to me, wanting just one more uninterrupted moment.  I searched his face, the things I needed to speak into the universe trapped at the back of my throat. The words ached to escape _over and over and over again_. That he had become part of me.  That I wanted to see Lallybroch as the seasons changed. That this _place_ , his _family_ , felt like the final piece of the puzzle I’d been putting together since I lost my parents, lost Uncle Lamb. That I felt like I belonged here.  

_Home. You. Me. Us. Here. Now._

But my confession did not come, and I smiled, smoothing down the collar of his coat. He quirked an eyebrow plainly expecting me to say _something_ that did not come. I gave him a final pat on his lapels. “Let’s go see your family.”

We shared the load of presents and bags and only just managed it across the threshold before Maggie came barreling into my legs, sock-covered feet thumping as she barreled towards me, feet skidding over the hardwood.

“Auntie Claire!” she shrieked, her face at my waist.  She was a great deal taller than she had been the last time I had seen her.

“Excuse me, Ms. Murray, what am I, then? Chopped liver?” Jamie asked, his voice light and eyes sparkling as they flicked from my face to Maggie and back again.

Maggie cranked her head around to look at him, arms not leaving my waist.  “I’m cross with ye Uncle Jamie. Ye’ve no’ asked Auntie Claire to be more than just your _girlfriend_.” ****

“ _Hey_.” The word came out of him as almost a _squeak_ – a high-pitched thing accompanied by raised eyebrows.

“Jamie–” I started, reaching for his arm and giving it a light squeeze.

“ _Margaret Ellen Murray_.”  Jenny’s voice sounded down the hall like a cracking whip.  She came up from behind her daughter and took her by the shoulders, shaking her head at me and smiling a little.

“I know she didn’t–” I started again.

“Dinna pay any mind to this silly child of mine.”  Jenny gave me a meaningful look and pursed her lips before turning her attention to Maggie. “And ye need to be nicer to yer poor misguided uncle.”

Maggie turned her attention to Jenny. “But Mam, ye told Da that Uncle Jamie–” ****

At once, Jenny clamped a hand over Maggie’s lips and shook her head. “Are you _tryin’_ to get yerself taken off Santa’s nice list, ye wee gomeral? Because I ken that he’s still checkin’ that list for tomorrow night.”

Maggie, taken by a fit of giggles, wiggled free from her mother’s grasp and charged down the hall away from us.  

Separate from Maggie’s chatter and the noise and chaos that seemed to live in her bones, I was able to immerse myself in the full Lallybroch Christmas experience for a moment.  The entryway was covered in fresh garland wrapped so thickly in red and gold ribbons, bows, and warm white lights that it was barely visible. The prickly aroma of pine was subdued by the heady spiciness of mulled wine and the thick, buttery aroma of cookies in the oven. In the background Maggie sang along to swelling of French Christmas carols, her voice surprisingly smooth and beautiful.

After Jamie had helped me out of my coat, Jenny hugged me, her fingers sinking into my upper arms and her lips finding my cheek. “Jamie told me that ye’ve been havin’ some–”

“Janet,” Jamie snapped, his tone harsh, resolved.  “What is it about ye Murray women? Can ye no’ keep from stickin’ yer feet in yer mouths for a minute?”

“Well _James_ ,” she snapped, giving as good as she got, “ye tell me these things and I’m no’ supposed to ask my kids’ auntie how she’s doin’–”

“Not when it’s goin’ to drag up all sorts of–”

“ _Stop_ ,” I finally cut in.  “Jamie, it’s fine. I’m fine.”

He swallowed, hard, and then exhaled.

“I’m sure Jamie told you then that I had a patient–”

_heart hammering, blood rushing, stomach dipping, fingers tingling –_

“um… a patient who passed away on my table… unexpectedly…”

_heart slowing, cheeks pink, stomach unknotting, hands stilling_ –

“but I am okay. I am sure this holiday is very difficult for her family. But _thank you_ for asking, Jenny.”

“Good,” Jenny said, shooting a look that could kill at Jamie, and placing a hand on my upper arm.  “That’s all I needed to know.  That was no’ so hard, was it Jamie?”

In my peripheral vision, I could see that Jamie eased a little, his muscles relinquishing the tightness that coiled him with a pulsating energy.

The Laird’s room, while remaining empty since his father’s passing, had become a haven of sorts during our visits to Lallybroch. With the door firmly closed behind me,I rounded on him. I was firm but attempted a gentleness.  “That was a little much down there… putting yourself in between Jenny and me.”

“She’s my sister. She should no’ have brought it up.”

“Right, but you don’t have to manage conversations for me.   _Especially_ conversations with Jenny.”

He was putting his clothes in the dresser – a pretense for not having to look at me. “When we left home for the country to get away… Claire… I… well… ye had me on my knees. I was worrit and I dinna want ye back there in that headspace… thinking about it.”

He braced himself on the edge of the dresser, hands spread across its width.  I wanted him to turn, to look at me, for him to see that I was _just fine_. He needed to know that there was not a question that would undo the work we had done, the work that _I_ had done.

“Jenny has a tendency to bring things up… not to know when to stop.  She does it with me all of the time.”

I swallowed, knowing full well what he was talking about. The evidence of the things he did not want to speak of was written all over his body, and a realization washed over me. He wasn’t just protecting me out of a misguided need to be my white knight. He was shielding me from the type of inquiries he himself did not want to face.

“The scars on your back,” I whispered, “they’re _there_ , but when I touch you, it doesn’t take you back there, right?”

I stepped nearer to him, keeping my feet as light on the floor as possible in an attempt not to add more _noise_ to the buzzing between us.  It was like he sensed my presence – a ragged breath, head bowed, his grip loosening.

“No.  It doesn’t,” he answered simply.

I slipped my fingers under his shirt, knowing without seeing the shape of the silvery puckers and pale pink rivets. The pattern of his scars stretched like a topographic map to the parts of him that were undamaged. The scars and the stories they carried with them were just a much a part of him as the blood running in his veins.  He would carry those scars until he no longer drew breath and long after his heart ceased to beat in his chest.  They would perhaps be flatter, softer, paler, shinier, but they would always dent his flesh with the past.

“And it’s not just _your back_ that you’re talking about, right?”

“No.  The other… _stuff_.” His admission came out of him and it was a bell that had sounded and could not be unrung.

“Your thigh…”

At this, a deeper intake of air, a tension and then a release.

His answer came as part of a breath: “Yes.”

My hand slipped lower and ran along his outer thigh, right where he had been split apart during the war. It had sent him spiraling down, down, down long before I knew him, but the trauma was still there at times. It was in a flinch at loud noises, a heightened awareness in a crowd, a quietness in moments where his eyes were far away and his thigh was taking a beating under rapid fingers.

I stilled my hands on him and rested my cheek midway up his spine. Closing my eyes, I concentrated on the gentle tap of his heartbeat.  

“I _hate_ answering Jenny’s questions about it.  She helped me when I came back, dinna get me wrong, but she shouldna _make_ ye need to talk about it with her, ye ken?”

After a beat, I answered, “Yes, I understand.”  

The things that had happened to him were a clumsy analogy to what I was feeling, but we did not have a shared language to discuss loss. He knew what it was like to face down well-meaning questions, to be expected to provide answers.

What happened in that operating room was a healing wound, some days it ached as the edges drew together into scar tissue, some days it burned like it was being urged open again. Some days it was there only at the edges, where it existed only as a fact in my history. I did not want the _bad stuff_ , but I wanted the bad stuff _with him_ when the inevitability of adversity became reality. The happening of the ugliness in life was as certain as the seasons, the sun rising and setting, the passage of time.

“I know what it’s like to be asked again and again about the worst things that have happened to ye. Just as ye’re just putting yerself back together… it’s devastating. And it’s got to be on yer own terms or ye’ll go mad, Sassenach.”

“Do you see the irony in what you just said?” If it had been a lighter moment, I would have laughed and pushed him a little, a spirited jab to his shoulder. He was trying to let me heal on my own terms by interjecting himself where he was not needed.

He supplied a snort of laughter and finally turned, leaning against the dresser and pulling me close to him.

“I ken what it is to be…”

The trailing of his words made me want to touch him – to feel the curve of his cheek under my thumb, to feel the softness of his mouth on mine – but I stayed still.  He started again before I could supply the words to fill in the blank.

“I ken what it is to be broken, Claire. It… it’s part of the reason that I’m so…”

His voice trailed off, his eyes searching as his mouth drew into a tight line. His hands pulled me so close that my neck ached from looking up at him.  It felt like it took an hour before he spoke again

“It’s why I’m so _protective_ of you. I love you, and I canna stand to see ye hurting.”

“Jamie, I love you, but what happened with…”

I struggled, trying not to say her name –

“ _Marianne_ …”

_a weight lifted_ –

“well, it’s a part of my job. I’m coming to accept that.”

And I was – I would never forget her name, her words, her father’s fingertips grinding into my thigh, the bruises that bloomed there and were faint yellow reminders for a few weeks _,_ the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness it all wrought. It had become a part of my flesh.

“Sometimes you win ones you shouldn’t.  Sometimes you lose ones you shouldn’t. It’s the magic in the science.”

With an uncharacteristic tentativeness, he brushed an errant curl from my forehead, his eyes moving with his fingers.  

“I need _you_ , Jamie, but I don’t need you to speak for me. Or to defend me from every little thing you _think_ will upset me.”

“But I _want_ to protect you.”

“And that’s enough unless I ask for more.  Just knowing that you’re there means more than you’ll ever know.”

His nose nudged mine before his lips found my mouth.  They were dry and forgiving, and it was like he had never kissed me before.  The taste of him in my mouth – the sugar cookie he had snatched from the backseat of the car as we drove was still on his tongue. The scent of his warm skin spiraled up and up and up into my nose, intoxicating me – our laundry detergent, his cologne, his aftershave. The soft curl of his hair on my fingers as I touched his neck – the haircut he had canceled to get an extra hour at work earlier in the week leaving him just a little undone.  The tremor in his lips as I sighed into his mouth led me to conclude that we had both apparently arrived at the same realization: we would never get enough of each other.

Jenny’s shout that “ _food’s ready_ ” echoed down the hall and we pulled apart, both a little breathless.  His lips landed squarely on mine briefly – once, twice more.  Our foreheads rested together, lips just barely apart. We stayed there – faces touching but not kissing – for long enough that Jenny called for us again.

We blinked at each other as the moment faded. The intimacy and peace of it lingered in my belly, expanding into my chest and taking root.

Before he pulled away, I sighed a confession: “What I really want to know is what your sister told Maggie.”

Jamie’s hands slipped lower around my hip as he maneuvered us to the door. “Maybe you should ask her,” he said, as if it was not already my intention to interrogate the younger Murray.


	10. Part Ten

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @kkruml as always deserves major props for the end result. <3

##  **Loss (Modern AU)  
** **Part 10**

I hated to pick favorites among the kids who called Jamie “uncle” and me “auntie,” but I had an unrelenting soft spot for Maggie. Her dimples, her curls, her permanently-rosy cheeks and smile with holes where front teeth belonged, her quickness to take to me, her effusive insistence that she wanted to be a doctor all carved out a piece of my heart just for her. ****

Settled in for lunch next to each other, the youngest Ms. Murray talked a mile a minute and barely let me break into her near-uninterrupted stream of consciousness.  

For a while, she lobbed question after question after question at me:

“Auntie Claire, do ye still have the picture I drew in yer locker at work?” ( _Yes, I have the picture. Always will. It was an elaborate crayon portrait of the two of us on the carousel at the shore._ )

“What was yer favorite subject in school?” ( _“Life science_ ,” _an easy answer for a question even given my peculiar, nomadic upbringing.)_

When she looked up at me with doe eyes and pouty lips, her sandwich flayed open, I knew to remove the tomato. Something about the moment pulled at my heart. I looked up, just _feeling_ eyes on me.  Jamie was looking at us intently, a bottle of beer halfway to his mouth and eyes working at a low simmer.  The way he was looking at me – eyes traveling a route from my face to the tomato speared on my fork and back up again – made my heart skip.

When I regained my composure and turned back, Maggie was staring at us intently.  

“My mam says ye’re goin’ ta marry Uncle Jamie. Issat true, Auntie Claire?”

Her question was not new.  Maggie had consistently asked me a similar question since Jamie and I had moved in together. The first time the Murrays had visited our flat, Jenny had hissed under her breath at Jamie to “just set the date, so I dinna have to explain to my daughter that her uncle’s livin’ in sin.”

“Yes, I think Jamie… your Uncle Jamie… and I will get married.”

I cast a look back down the table to Jamie who was by now completely absorbed by something Ian was saying, head tipped back in laughter _._

“Mam says that the two of ye have gaga eyes for each other. How do ye get gaga eyes?”

“Oh. Well, someday when you… you love someone ye’ll make gaga eyes at them without even knowing you’re doing it.”

“Hmmm.”  She just stared skeptically for a moment, an uncharacteristic moment where she appeared to just be _thinking_ and not _saying_. “What’s yer favorite snack at the cinema? Mine’s pick’n’mix.”

I thought for a moment and responded popcorn, which Maggie declared was _bo-oh-ring_.

“Do ye like cats, Auntie Claire?”

I pushed the olives out of my salad and shrugged.  “Sure, they’re fine.”

“Did ye ken that Uncle Jamie bought ye a ring?”

Everything went dark, my vision slowly crawling shut until it was merely a pinhole. “Maggie–”

She did not do me the courtesy of giving me a moment to catch my breath.

“Mam let me bring a baby kitten inside from the barn–”

“Mags…”

“–because he was so poorly!”

\- _oh my God everything was going fuzzy –_

“– and I named him Henry the VIII.”

Unable to process the rapid shift in topics, my mind shorted out with: “That’s quite a name for a poorly kitten.”

I looked back to Jamie who was telling Ian _something_ – the rushing of her little voice tittering in my ears at the speed of hummingbird wings meant that I could not pinpoint his voice in the cacophony.

I was overwhelmed. The smell of the fire roaring in the fireplace.  The pine. The egg nog.  The cookies.  The sharpness of the cinnamon candles dotting the table.  The sounds of forks and knives on plates.  The laughter – Jamie’s, Ian’s, Jenny’s.  The chatter, incessant and sweet, coming from my seatmate.   _A ring_.

Maggie’s mouth fell silent as she tore into her sandwich. I lowered my voice, unable to stop myself from asking.  “Earlier you said that your Mam said something to your Da about Uncle Jamie.  What did she say?”

My eyes darted to Jenny.  Her hands were busy prepping young Ian’s lunch, but she was as absorbed as Ian in what Jamie was saying.

Maggie made a long _hmmmmm_ noise, chewing furiously.  It was a noise that I assumed would, by adolescence, take on an attitude and drive her parents utterly crazy.  She smacked her lips before answering, her face melting into the thoughtfulness of an innocent child who was trying in earnest to remember, to understand.  

“Well, Mam and Da thought I was in bed, but I couldna sleep because I forgot to check on Henry the VIII’s water.”

I realized that by asking what she heard, I had committed myself to hear nearly every moment of bedtime until _whatever it was_ Jenny had said to Ian.  And even then, the answer about what she heard would be filtered through her inexperience and the memory of a child, but I _still needed to know_.

Glancing up, I breathed a quiet sigh of relief that no one was paying attention to us. Maggie eventually detailed her entire odyssey and landed squarely where I had hoped the conversation could begin and end.

“So Mam said to Da that she thinks you’re the cat’s pajamas–”

I could not for the life of me picture Jenny Murray using the phrase, but allowed Maggie continue uninterrupted –

“and that if Uncle Jamie isna an idjit he’d put a ring on your finger.  She said he needs to make ye an honest woman.  Did ye _lie_ about something Auntie Claire?”

I could not stop myself from cupping the back of her head with my hand and kissing her straight blonde hair.  She smelled like honey and cream. Her usual _soft baby_ scent had been lessening each time we saw her and was now almost gone.

“No, lovey.  I did not lie about anything.  That means that your Mam thinks we should be married because Uncle Jamie and I live in the same flat.”

_Jenny Murray was nothing if not opinionated._

“Oh, well, I canna disagree with my Mam on that point.”

The words sounded foreign, as though they were her mother’s and she was just trying them out for the first time. I fought the urge to laugh.  

Our moment was broken apart when Ian called: “Oi… Claire.” I looked down to the other end of the table.  Smirking, maybe a little tipsy, Ian swirled his glass of wine and took a long draw. I glanced back to Maggie.  My attention having been diverted for only a moment, Maggie had immediately fallen into some idle chatter with young Jamie and our moment was broken.

Just for an instant I mourned the passing of our conversation.

“Flu shots – is there any point?” Ian asked.

I crossed my legs under the table and took a sip of my own drink.

Most doctors I knew lamented their relatives’ apparent lack of restraint when it came to asking for free medical advice. I had frequently heard colleagues moan on over an uncle or aunt, cousin or brother-in-law wanting to know this or that.  The conversations usually concluded with “ _and I’d never ask him to do my taxes for free, so why should I give away the farm?_ ”

Nineteen months earlier – before I had this family in my life – I would have killed for that kind of professional curse. To have _someone_ to ask me questions.  

Now I had an entire table of _someones_ to ask me questions and I happily launched into everything there was to know about seasonal influenza vaccines.

After a joint post-lunch cleanup effort, Jamie, Ian, and the kids charged out into the snow while Jenny and I sat down to drink coffee.  Through the window, they were vivid against almost-blinding white of the snow in their primary-colored coats, hats, and scarves. The front steps had been swallowed by snow since Jamie and I arrived.

The kids were on their namesakes’ shoulders – Ian on his father and Jamie Murray clinging to Fraser. Maggie was wrapped around Jamie’s chest like a baby monkey. Jamie crouched, carefully suspending Young Jamie over the ground to reach into the snow. I could hear Maggie screaming as they dipped until her ponytail brushed across the snow.

It was too loose to form a snowball and when Young Jamie threw it, it simply created a glittering cloud that floated down over Jamie and Maggie. Jamie laughed and dipped his niece and nephew onto the ground, using one arm to sweep a curtain of snow over them both.

“Ye ken something, Claire?” Jenny was looking out the window, too, her hands moving without hesitation over the red linen napkins she was folding into napkin rings.  Their play had rapidly evolved into a game of tag. “ _That_ out there… it jus’ makes me wanta to ovulate.”

I snorted.  I would have been lying to say that the sight of Jamie playing with his niece and nephews did not stir something in me.  

“I’ve got more than enough bairns runnin’ ‘round this place like mad, but I could use a niece or a nephew.”

I almost spat a mouthful of coffee onto the table.  

“Here, let’s make this interesting, aye?” Jenny pulled a bottle of Irish cream from the cupboard and poured a healthy portion into my mug. “By now ye ken that Jamie is wantin’ bairns, I’m sure.”

Brows furrowed, I gave the mug a sniff.  The drink was now boozy and strong, the spirits swirling and warm, tingling in my nose.

“Of course.  He told me that he wanted an entire rugby team on maybe the second…” I paused.  I didn’t know how much Jenny knew about us.

“That second weekend ye were together? Aye, Claire, he’s told me all about it. He came to Sunday dinner beamin’ like he’d won the lottery. He was absolutely besotted by you.”

For some reason I did not find myself to be completely offended by Jamie’s apparent over sharing. I couldn’t fathom a world in which he gave her _details_. Like the fact that he made his disclosure right before he led me down the hallway to his bedroom.

I was swimming in my own head.  I had not made it to month nineteen with James Fraser thinking that he was _only kind of sort of in love with me_ , but to hear it from someone outside of our microcosm made the floor shift beneath my feet.

Jenny was looking at me, her eyes willing me to say _something_ , _anything_. A response did not come to mind and I did not know what she expected me to say, so I stayed silent, sipping my coffee.

When it was clear that I would not respond, Jenny smirked and shrugged.  “It was the first time since comin’ back from Afghanistan that I’d seen him look sae… hopeful.  Happy.”

“Well, he’s made… he makes me…” my voice faded and I felt my mind wandering a little before finishing, “ _so_ happy.”

“Ye canna fix a man, but ye’ve healed him, Claire. I’m no’ sayin’ anythin’ else.”

And she didn’t.  

She flipped topics as skillfully as her daughter – talking about how young Jamie had gotten in trouble at school earlier that week for taking the class toad to the lunchroom.  

I half-listened, entranced by the scene playing out through the window.

That night we watched _A Miracle on 34th Street_. Maggie made a home on my lap, wrapped in a fleecy blanket.  It did not take long for her to fall asleep, thumb in her mouth.  I angled my neck to look down at the bundle nestled on my chest – her long black eyelashes on her wind-burnt cheeks, the slight “v” between her eyebrows, and the soft set of her chin against her chest.   _God, this child._

Gently enough not to wake Maggie, Jamie slipped his arm around my waist, his fingers coming to rest on the sliver of bare skin between my pajama pants and his sweatshirt.  I shifted just enough to press myself full against his side and to rest my head on his chest.  The sigh that came from him warmed me from the belly up – it was an exhalation that sounded like contentment.  Soon I was fast asleep, too.

I woke to a quiet room and blinked slowly, registering that I’d slept through at least the last hour of the film.  I closed my eyes again, letting out a long sigh.

I must have dozed again because the next thing that registered was Ian carefully extracting his slumbering daughter from my arms, smiling. “They’re both out like a light,” he whispered to Jamie.  

With the Maggie’s solid weight no longer warming my chest, I curled further into Jamie’s chest. I hated the idea of having to move. His fingers tangled in the curls at the nape of my neck and I wrapped my arms around his waist.

“I don’t want to move,” I finally managed, having lost all sense of time. It felt like a century had passed with him just stroking my hair.

“Do ye need me to carry ye upstairs?” His laugh was low, a little sleepy itself.

“Mmmm. Nothing’s happening tonight.  I’m too tired.”  

At this, he actually laughed, seemingly no longer groggy. “Good.  I never said I wanted _something_ to happen tonight, anyway,” he teased.  “I’m too tired to service ye properly, anyway.”

“ _Good_ ,” I responded, smiling and inhaling the warmth of him radiating through his sweatshirt. “And you could use a shower after all of that horsing around outside.”

“Well now ye’re just being mean.”  Jamie pulled my hair just a little bit so my face tilted up towards him.  I thought he was going to kiss me, but instead he just made a face.   “But Christ, I love ye anyway.”

He looked content and somewhat awed, like the rest of the world was gray and I was in technicolor.

In my belly that look felt just as intimate as if he _had_ kissed me.


	11. Part Eleven

 

##  **Loss (Modern AU)  
** **Part Eleven**

On Christmas Eve, I read Marianne’s obituary.

She was beautiful in the picture –– on a beach, grinning, holding a seashell to her ear, looking wistfully to the sky.  

It recounted the basics: her name and age ( _as if I could ever forget_ ), her favorite sports ( _football, field hockey, swimming_ ), her favorite band ( _a group I had never heard of that she saw six times with her friends_ ), her time spent volunteering ( _an animal shelter_ ), and broad statements about her goals ( _finish university, more field hockey, to become a botanist, to alleviate world hunger_ ).

It was precisely the obituary one would expect for an untimely loss.

But then the last line, the one that surprised me:

_The family would like to extend its gratitude to the doctors, nurses, and staff at the Edinburgh Medical Center for the compassion and care that they showed Marianne._

Questions swirled in my mind and I was stuck, breathing through my mouth.

I was imagining Marianne’s unwritten story –– a Christmas Eve with her family.

“What are ye thinking about? I’ve no’ looked so serious for a verra long time.”  Jamie’s hands warmed my shoulders.

I caught Jamie’s eye in the vanity mirror as I brought my hand to rest on his.  

“ _Her_.” I tried to remedy my unintentionally flat affect with a half-smile. “It’s okay.”

He looked unconvinced –– eyebrows raised, tongue sweeping over his front teeth.  “Do ye want to talk about it?”

I shrugged, allowing my hand to fall back to my lap and tilting my head just enough to rest my cheek on his hand.“Not sure what there is to talk about really.”

I wondered if Marianne’s bereaved family would make her favorite dish for their Christmas meal in her memory. I wondered if they would celebrate at all –– her absence such a noticeable void that they would call the whole thing off.  I wondered if they would try to keep her name off of their tongues, trying find a new normal.  

“Grief’s a funny thing, huh?” I finally sighed, rubbing my cheek over the back of his knuckles.

“Aye,” he said, half-noise and half-word.  I let my eyes fall shut for a moment –– I counted my heartbeats, trying to dissociate from the questions.  

When opened my eyes, Jamie was looking at me with his head cocked to the side.  He lifted his large hand and ghosted it over my shoulder. It was like he was trying to work out whether he should touch me or not.  

“You see some of the darkest parts of me and stick around.  Why is that?” He had never run from me.  He had never even made me think he was going to.  It never ceased to amaze me how quickly he had become my constant –– even if, like me, he was still trying to untangle what I needed.

“ _You know why_.” The response was so quintessentially _him_.  A little cocky, completely true, spoken without reservation.  “Are ye okay? Should we let them go to mass without us…? We could stay here?”

“I’m okay as long as we’re both still breathing.” At this he smiled a little, his hand grazing the length of my shoulder.

“Well I canna fault yer logic, Sassenach, even if it’s a bit dramatic.” From his crooked smile, I could tell that he found my statement amusing. “We _are_ both _verra fine_ if we’re alive and together.”

“ _So––_ ” I started, an attempt to right the ship into calmer seas. “ _Mass_.”

“Aye. Ye’re goin’ to put a sweater on, right? Because this…”

I could feel his eyes scorching right through the crimson silk crepe.

“‘Tis a verra fine dress, but it isna… weel… it isna what I’d say is _Highlands_ Christmas Eve _mass_ appropriate.”

I made a show of spritzing perfume over my décolleté and grinned.  “Of course there’s a sweater and I’ll even button it to the throat… just for you.”

I did my best approximation of a sexy look, eyes on his in the mirror: waggling eyebrows, pouty lips. ****

“The dress is for whatever quiet time we can find after church.” ****

If forced to rate my come-on, I would have placed it somewhere in the neighborhood of “ _Jamie attempting to wink_.” ****

“I figured you could unwrap me.”

Jamie laughed, head tilting like he was considering the proposition.

As I stood, his hand remained steady and trailed from my shoulder down the length of my spine. His palm came to rest at the small of my back where it stayed as we left our room and descended the stairs to the foyer. Under his breath, helping me into my sweater and taking care with each button, he whispered, “I intend to do more than unwrap ye.”

In the candle-lit glow of the church Jamie was all shadowed angles and fiery hair.  His eyes were dark as he read along with the prayers without looking down at the program he had curled in his hands. Maggie’s head was on his knee and her thumb was sucked deep into the recesses of her small mouth. His hand rested on the suitcoat he had carefully situated over her when she had started to whine, a little too loudly, that the church was ‘ _sae cold, Uncle Jamie_.’

Maggie woke as we passed flame from candle to candle down the pew. Tired and a little cranky, she resituated herself on Ian’s hip.  

I fought the urge to snicker when Jamie mumbled, “Guess the charms of ol’ Uncle Jamie and Auntie Claire wore off.”

Maggie lit my candle, her small hand surrounded by her father’s steady fingers.  

“Happy Christmas, Auntie Claire,” she said in a small, drowsy voice.  

I kissed her sleep-warm cheek and murmured the same in response before turning.

Jamie was staring at me.

“You’re a little intense tonight,” I whispered, angling my candle down to light his.

“Ye have no idea, Sassenach.”

Something about the warm glow of light over him, the choral swelling of O Holy Night, and the smell of pine _everywhere_ , made me feel an almost-irresistible pull to him.  

This was what I had been missing for a lifetime.

“I love you,” I whispered, my words coming only after he had turned to light the candle of the person next to him.

The next candle lit, Jamie looked back to me.  His response was clear, a little too-loud, and made me smile: “I love _you_.”

Jenny hissed “ _shhh_ ” and Ian snorted.

It was well after three in the morning by the time the kids tucked into their beds. Riding the high of our midnight mass, we helped Ian and Jenny wrap Christmas presents and drank mulled wine.  Glowing with a slight buzz by firelight, fingers tangled in tape, I was overwhelmed by the notion that for once I had a family.  

Presents wrapped and the dishwasher humming, I went to take off my boots and Jamie took my elbow. “Let’s get away.  Right now. Just the two of us.”

“Are you saying that you would like to make some noise, Mr. Fraser?”

The humor died on my lips at the way he looked at me –– eyes like a sea just before a storm, skin warmed to pink by alcohol, lips set in a firm line.

“Wait… Like the barn? The backseat of the car? What are you after here?”

“No’ the barn.   _The treehouse_.”

“Are you actually fucking crazy? It’s _December_.”

As if it made a lick of difference, he countered, “But it’s also _Christmas_.”

There were no words to convey my skepticism, so I gave him a blank look.

“I’ll make it worth yer while, Sassenach.”  He blinked hard, his lips curled up in a self-aware smile. “I’ll let ye make a Christmas wish.”

“A Christmas wish, huh? Is it some sort of weird Scottish tradition?”

Shaking his head, he helped me into my coat, hands straying and breath warm on my ear before he spoke again. My legs wobbled. “I’m no’ a romantic type, ye ken.”

I disagreed that he was not the romantic type.  

He was utilitarian in showing his love –– quietly anticipating what I needed or wanted, never ostentatious with gifts, an almost singular instinct to keep me safe that sometimes conflicted with an equally-potent predisposition to let me do my own thing.

But at the end of all things, he _was_ –– fundamentally –– a romantic.

“I’m makin’ it up as I go along.  Is it workin’?”

Suddenly all I wanted was closeness, not necessarily _sex_ , but somewhere that we could disappear alone.

“Yes, Jamie. It’s working.”  

The night was still –– a perfect silence.  The sky was cloudless and the stars were pinpoints in a canopy of black velvet. During the summer, a well-worn footpath cut through tangled weeds, grass, and vegetation, making the treehouse easy to find.  With the path now covered with snow, I followed Jamie’s lead.

Speaking in the silence felt like an act against nature itself, and we stayed silent.

Jamie paused, lifting a precariously-low tree branch, heavy under the weight of snow. I slipped under it, just a flurry snow fell in a cascade from the limb.  He chuckled a low, round sound from deep in his chest as he wiped me clean.

His touch was steady, firm, thorough.

He shook his head when I started to speak my thanks, drawing me to his side. I stilled my chattering teeth in his coat as we continued to walk. I focused on his heartbeat, the sharp sound of the snow protesting beneath the weight of our footprints, the endless and frozen moment of our after-midnight stroll.

When he helped me up the ladder and into the treehouse, I was stunned.  Christmas lights glowed in a veritable constellation on the ceiling and cast soft shadows over the roughhewn walls.  Candles with battery-operated flames – the ones I thought were neat and Jamie thought were pointless – dotted every surface.  A fluffy duvet was folded carefully over the end of the narrow mattress.  A space heater hummed in the corner, casting off a warmth that cut the chill enough that the space was not uncomfortable.

I turned. Jamie was standing at the door with his arms crossed over his chest, watching me.

“You planned this.” My voice cracked –– from the cold, from the overwhelming emotion of it all, from not speaking on our walk.

It was neither an accusation nor a question.  It was _wonder_ at the enchanting tableau he had created in one of his most precious places.

His thumb swept the width of his lower lip, cocking his head. He was _glowing_ in the Christmas lights. “Guilty.”

“Did you bring me up here to seduce me?”  This time he chuckled, stepping towards me with purpose.

“Something like that.” His eyes fixed on his fingers as they unzipped my coat and deftly pushed it off my shoulders. “Would you say ‘yes’ to a lewd proposal?”

“What do you think?” I asked, turning my attention to his coat.  He shrugged out of it as I brought my hands to his neck.

I had only been up here once –– when he told me about building the treehouse with his father.  

It had been the first time he told me that he loved me.  

We had been so early in our relationship then –– my head constantly swimming when he challenged me. He said things that threw me off balance and gradually drew me out of the barrier I had erected after a string of failed relationships.  

Physically _in the space_ , though, the treehouse was no longer an unspoken bookmark in our story.  Being _there_ was acknowledgment that our time there was one in a series of important beginnings for us.  

At the time it had felt new and exciting to be with him and to test the idea of _love_ with him.  Now it felt like it was a part of who we were together.

Reverent, deliberate fingers fulfilled his earlier promise to unwrap me. His touch was filled with the kind of awe usually reserved for our reconnection after a long business trip or a weekend apart.

I let him lead and became his parallel. Each touch, each kiss, each sigh had a purpose and a place on my skin, in my chest, my heart.

Face-to-face on our sides, he gasped when my body accepted his. It was almost as if he was surprised at our joining and the feeling of my body around him.  Our lips and the way we made contact were filled with such a quiet, throbbing affection that I felt my insides stinging.

It was the opposite of the noisy, woodsy romp I thought he was angling for when we set out into the woods.

What I got was _better_ –– a quiet evocation of our love.  

We did not speak, our mouths fused together and making only thin noises into the void. My hand traced the line of his jaw as his found my cheek. ****

It was warm and slow. Simmering at first then slowly building and building. Heady on devotion, we compiled each other’s sounds and touched like it was our very last time.  

The entire world stopped and we were all that was left – our hips soldered together, tongues pulsing over one another.  

It was a wordless promise.   _You.  Me.  We are infinite._

Afterwards, sated, glowing, and entirely unable to face the prospect of returning to the house, I let Jamie dress me. I watched his large fingers on each buttonhole. When he brought the elastic waistband of my knickers over my thighs, my mind was set adrift.

He had done this very thing for me the night Marianne died.  When I had been broken, he had dressed me.  

I slipped my fingers into his sweat-damp curls and curved my touch his scalp. He pressed his lips against the skin to the side of my navel as he had weeks earlier.  

Even on the other side of the numbness I felt that night _,_ I could have cried.  A little for the loss, but mostly for the tenderness he had shown me. The gentleness of his efforts to put me back together, born out of his pure love for me, was something I had not even known to wish for.

“What did I do to deserve you?” I asked, my voice still aroused and suddenly drowsy.

“Mmmm.”  It was a non-answer into my flesh as his mouth moved to the other side of my navel.

He carefully eased me back onto the bed, tucking his face into the curve of my neck.

He never did answer and I drifted away, pressed against him with my feet tangled around his calves.

I waded out of sleep slowly – urged back to consciousness by Jamie’s voice.

“ _Sassenach_.”  

It was a whisper from ten thousand miles away.

He brushed his fingers over my collarbones, his hands meeting in the middle.  

He lifted the small pendant at my throat and rolled it over his fingers. His habit of toying with it started early –– before we even had a relationship. He would take small diamond, just to test the weight of it and then press it into my skin.  It was weird, but it was _his thing_ and I loved it.  I smiled when, true to form, he pressed it down at my throat.

“Claire.  C’mon.”

Lifting layers of sheets and quilt, his hand slipped down between us and skirted over the front of his shirt until he found bare skin.  

“Wake–”

_a kiss on my chin_ –

“–up.”

I let out a strangled sound ( _mostly consonants_ ) as I rolled into my pillow.

Eventually I managed, “Go back to sleep.”

He let out a semi-responsive, ragged sound as he disappeared beneath the duvet.  My mind swam with a sleepy anticipation of his tongue, but he instead he blew a raspberry on my belly that made me squeal as I arced away from him.

“ _Bastard_ ,” I squeaked, the word choked by the promise of a laugh.  I sank my fingers into his hair and urged his head out from under the covers.

“I havena slept…” The bedding rustled as he moved his face over my stomach.  When he popped up like mole seeking daylight, I drew his face the rest of the way to mine. “Are ye awake now?”

“Hardly,” I sighed. Our lips barely moved as I went to kiss him. I curled my fingers deeper into his hair and drew his mouth fully over mine.   _Bliss_.

He allowed my silence for only a few moments before asking, “Can ye wake up for just a few minutes?”

I uttered a sleepy “ _nope_ ,” turning from him and nuzzling my nose back into the pillow.  I could not help smiling when I confessed, “You’ve tired me out Fraser.   _And_ it’s the middle of the night. _And_ tomorrow’s Christmas.”

Our day had been near endless –– chasing the kids, cooking, drinking whisky and wine in various forms, _Marianne_ , midnight mass, trekking through the woods in my Christmas dress and heeled boots, and finally treehouse sex that left me boneless and disembodied.

I wanted to sleep until the rest of the world came looking for us.

“Technically… I think it _is_ Christmas, Sassenach.”

A rush of cool air chilled me when he broke the seal of the blankets holding us together. He slipped from the bed and my hands scrabbled for the warmth his body had left behind.

“What time is it?” I asked, finding the sheet and pulling it to my chest.  It was still warm where it had been wrapped around his broad shoulders.

“Early, but still well before dawn.” The heavy length of his torso and limbs settled over me.  I felt him down to my bones.  His left hand was closed in a fist by my ear and I turned to nudge it with my nose.

The mere presence of him was a comfort.

Warm breath on my cheek, then a rasp of stubble along my ear. A warm woolen feeling of a dozing slumber filling my chest interrupted by an exasperated Scottish noise in my ear. The solid mass of my bloody Scot rising as he re-centered himself over my thighs.

“I dinna ken what to do about ye. I’ve tried to wake ye.”  

His words scarcely registered and I tensed, making myself unpliable as he tried to move me. I was about to comment that his petulant “ _wake up_ ” must be what Saturday mornings with children was like, but then –

“Claire.”

His voice was serious as I had ever heard it.  

“I’m tryin’ to ask ye to marry me.”

My heart stopped beating, my mind muddled, and everything outside of the warm radius of our bodies ceased to exist.

“ _Wake_. _Up_.”

_Oh_. This time, I was already awake. He moved to the edge of the bed, one leg folded under his body.

“Well, good morning,” he said with a hint of amusement in his voice.  He smoothed a tangle of curls down and tucked them behind my ear, his thumb grazing the curve of my earlobe.  “Are ye conscious now?”

I was only vaguely aware that I was nodding, my lower lip drawn between my teeth.  I was about to choke on tears and my own laughter.

He rolled his eyes.

“Well, now that ye’re up… I’d verra much appreciate it if ye’d show a little care for my nerves. Because I’m goin’ to try to tell ye how much I love ye, Claire.”

A breath.  His chest was heaving.  My fingers twisting into his undershirt, wanting him closer.  

“I knew the moment that I met ye that I’d no’ ever be able to let ye go.”

I fixed my concentration on the hammering of his heart under my palm.

There was nothing else on earth that could make me feel like this.  Nothing I could buy or steal –– only him, just _us_.

“I want to argue with ye about what movie we’re goin’ to see forever. I want to stare at ye over meals forever. I want to pretend to like yer cookin’ even though I canna stomach ninety percent of what ye make. I want to come home from every hard day to ye forever –– to see ye smile, smell that clean hospital-scrubbed smell on yer fingers when I kiss yer hands.”

His words broke the dam; I was crying.  

He smeared my tears with his thumb as it traced over my cheekbone, a thoughtful peace having taken over his face.  There was passion there, but he was measured. It was like he was unearthing words he had known for an eternity and knew by heart.

“I want ye at 2:00 in the morning when ye stumble home from work. I want ye to slip into our bed cold as winter. I dinna ken if I’ve ever told ye this, but I search for ye in my sleep, Claire. When ye’re not there I can still feel ye around me.”

_Oh God_.  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and my eyes burned.

“I dinna want to cry, but if I have to, I want _you_ to be the one to comfort me.  And if ye have tears of yer own, and I canna stop them for ye, I want to wipe them away. I want ye to be the person I kiss and make love to forever. I want to see ye carry our bairns –– in yer belly––”

_–– his hand skated over my stomach ––_

“––and in yer arms––”

_–– his hand caressing my forearm––_

“I want to fall in love with ye over and over again, _mo nighean donn_.”

When I started to speak, he pressed his palm over my lips.

“I ken ye’re not the meek and obedient type. _Nor_ are ye one just to sit and listen, but I’ll have ye ken that I am in charge of how I’m proposin’ to ye.”

I smiled under his hand, tears absolutely _pouring_ out of me and dribbling onto his fingers.  

“Ye could’ve proposed to _me_ , but ye’ve not, so this is _my_ grand speech. _Plus_ , this is my game, my rules. No interrupting.” ****

My tongue touched his palm when I laughed, trying to speak under the barricade he maintained over my lips. He groaned as he wiped my drool on the sheet.

“Can ye wait? Ye’re goin’ to get yer turn.”  

Tears fell faster and I nodded, not sure how much more of him I could take without completely dissolving. His eyes were so bright, so earnest under the Christmas lights.  

“I’ve rebuilt my life, Claire. I did the structural work before I met ye and my life _with_ **_you_** … well that life…”

For the first time, I thought he was going to break, but he continued.

“Well… it is as perfect a life as I could have ever hoped for. I want to spend the rest it keepin’ ye safe, tryin’ to help ye ken how much it means to me that ye chose… and that ye _choose_ …  to love me. And I want to spend that life provin to ye in _everythin’_ I do just how much I love _you_.”

I was ready to scream “ _yes_ ” to a question not yet asked, but I was absolutely paralyzed.

“So I ask ye, with that in mind… truth or dare?”

For the first time ever in our protracted game, I whispered, “Dare.”

“I dare you, Claire Beauchamp–”

_an intentional mispronunciation that made me laugh_ –

“to let me be yer husband.”

For a moment I breathed into his palm –– eyes fixed on him, heart priming itself to explode.  He was smiling, a slow nervous thing that made me love him even more.

In my peripheral vision, I saw his hand open and a shining flash. Having worn the same necklace for years, I had never fancied myself a jewelry aficionado. But the idea that Jamie had selected a ring for me to wear forever, a symbol of our love, had me infatuated.

_It was right there. All I had to do was look._

My breath was coming in shallow little gulps and I wondered, absently, whether I would ever stop crying.

Jamie brought his hand between us slowly. I looked down when he nodded.

_He remembered, the bloody bastard_.

It happened when, at my drunkest, I sprawled out over him.  He was equally inebriated.  It was early in our timeline –– the first summer we were together. I had slurred something about how “ _no man’ll make CLAIRE BEAUCHAMP submit for a diamond, no siree, Bob._ ” Laughing, he had asked, “ _Well, I dinna ken about **submitting** , but what about an **engagement** with a sapphire?”_ I had mumbled an indistinct “ _sure, whatever, fine_ ” into his throat.  At the time I had kept my tone teasing, but the thought had lurked at the back of my mind ever since.

In his palm, on a thin band, was a sapphire surrounded by a halo of tiny diamonds.

I swallowed and fought every instinct to crush my mouth to his.  

“Marry me?”  The punchline came simply, soft but strong.

And the answer was easy –– every road led to him, every fiber of my being knew not only that I needed him, but that I wanted to need him forever.  

My answer _creaked_ out of me –– a “ _yes_ ” muffled by emotion.

He raised an eyebrow, slipping the ring on my finger before brushing my hair away. With the slightest of smiles on his lips, he whispered, “Say it again, _Beauchamp_.”

And I said it –– again and again.  I maneuvered our limbs until I could climb into his lap. With his face in my hands _,_ our breath merged and our eyes locked. “ _Yes_. Yes.  A thousand times… yes.”

When he kissed me, it felt like we were writing the first line in a new book.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This last part of Loss is hopefully a love letter to everyone who has commented, liked, reblogged, messaged me, or shown love to this story. I owe you all so much. This story started with a small world in my mind and has grown and grown. Writing it has been an act of love –– largely finding my love for creative writing again and bringing me some wonderful friendships. 
> 
> There will be more ficlets and a sequel that has multiple parts at some point in the future. <3


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